Tufte CSS

GitHub: https://github.com/daveliepmann/tufte-css

Tufte-Latex, mentioned in the article, is a really nice template that produces some gorgeous Latex handouts with very little effort (I've used it a couple times when I wanted something to not look like the standard Latex article class). I thought it worth linking here for those that didn't read the link: https://tufte-latex.github.io/tufte-latex/

This seems like an okay idea, but does anyone feel that the italics used in the headings (font family: ETBembo) are generated and are quite ugly?

Cute idea. Needs a better example document to really be judged properly (for example, this document has a far too many large and imposing headings), but in any case, some comments:

Would be better with less leading, a smaller text size, smaller left margin, and more characters per line. This current version has a text block more like a newspaper column width than a book, and the large type and unnecessarily generous leading (especially in block quotations!) make it feel a bit like a children’s book. Not much content fits on screen at any time.

Small caps shouldn’t be used with a typeface/browsers that don’t properly support them and just shrink capital letters instead, they just look spindly and bad. Either find a real small caps font, or skip the idea. Likewise for italics: use a real italic font instead of a browser-generated oblique version of the roman font.

If you want it to look like a nicely typeset book, use an indented first line for new paragraphs rather than a blank line.

Lots of other parts need tweaks, but it would take making several sample documents and then judging how the parts interact.

Final note: Tufte’s books don’t look good because of the basic style choices, but because of the incredible care and attention he puts into writing and composing them. Crappy content is not going to suddenly become amazing when a different stylesheet is slapped onto it, and any document that aspires to be as pretty as a Tufte book is going to take many hours of manual composition.

nice share and creation