Years back, a team of dedicated obsessives created tufte-css, CSS library and Webfont package meant to duplicate the look and feel of Edward Tufte's much-loved books. The related tufte-markdown project was created to parse (mostly) standard Markdown into the idiosyncratic markup needed to make Tufte's styling sing.
Which brings us to Eleventy, the lightweight and customizable static site generator. By swapping in tufte-markdown for Eleventy's default markdown parser and slapping the tufte-css styles into a (fairly) vanilla setup, Elventufte offers a Tufte-like blogging experience in no time flat.
In exchange for some sensible (if slightly prescriptive) restrictions on page structure (always wrap the content in an <article> tag, only use H2 tags for post sections, etc), Tufte-flavored markdown also gives us some cool features like margin notes instead of footnotes and sensible image captions.
Out of the box, Eleventufte provides a simple home page, colophon and contact pages, individual post pages, an archive of posts by year, and a few feeds for syndication. While this project is less than ideal for a fancy, feature-rich blog, it's a nice place to start if you want to crank out a lot of text with footnotes, figures, and a sensible content hierarchy.
- Use eleventy-charts for visualization, the most Tufte of features
- Cleaner handling of attributed quotes and figures, with less manual HTML.
Give it a shot, nerds.