Tufte CSS

Simplicity, to me, has always been the essence of good taste.
-- Cary Grant

Edward Tufte uses a distinctive style in his handouts: simple, with well-set typography, extensive sidenotes, and tight integration of graphics and charts. tufte-css brings that style to HTML documents.

This project is directly inspired by and based on Tufte-LaTeX and the R Markdown Tufte Handout.

Getting Started

The file index.html is a self-describing demonstration document that walks through the features of Tufte CSS. The live version at https://edwardtufte.github.io/tufte-css/ is the best overview of the project.

To use Tufte CSS on your own HTML page, just copy tufte.css and the et-book font directory to your project and add the following to your HTML doc's head block:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="tufte.css"/>

All the other files can be ignored, as they are merely used by the demonstration document.

Contributing

If you notice something wrong or broken, let us know by opening an issue. Pull requests are very welcome.

For best results, keep pull requests to one change at a time, and test your fix or new functionality against index.html on screens as small as an iPhone 4 and as big as, well, as big as you use normally. (If you don't have a mobile device handy, fake different devices with your browser's developer tools.) See the Issues page, especially Help Wanted, for opportunities to contribute. Keep our style guide in mind:

CSS Style Guide

Every major open-source project has its own style guide: a set of conventions (sometimes arbitrary) about how to write code for that project. It is much easier to understand a large codebase when all the code in it is in a consistent style.
-- Google Style Guide

Tufte CSS aims for clarity, concision, and uniformity. Here's a basic example of our CSS conventions:

p { font-size: 1.4rem;
    line-height: 2rem;
    margin-top: 1.4rem;
    margin-bottom: 1.4rem;
    width: 55%;
    padding-right: 0;
    vertical-align: baseline; }
    
@media screen and (max-width: 600px) { p { width: 70%; }}
@media screen and (max-width: 400px) { p { width: 90%; }}

Notice the single spacing between most syntactic markers, the single blank lines between unrelated blocks, and the absence of line breaks after an open-paren and before end-parens. Notice also that these rules change slightly for media queries.

Contributors

• Dave Liepmann (creator, project maintainer, design)
• Edward Tufte (editing, direction, design)
• Clay Harmon (media queries, rem units)
• Linjie Ding (italic typeface)
• Stephen A Thomas (automagically numbered sidenotes)
• Ben Newman (sidenote numbering style)
• Kevin Godby (booktabs tables)
• James Kolce (sidenote fixes)
• Chris MacKay (sidenote toggling on small screens)
• Paul Rodriguez (sidenote style tweaks)
• Claudiu-Vlad Ursache (HTML5 conformity)

License

Released under the MIT license. See LICENSE.