Paperesque

A lightweight Hugo theme with a couple of neat tricks.

You can see it in action on capnfabs.net, or on the Hugo Themes Example Site.

Here’s what makes it special:

• Has a shortcode for resizing images to fit the page, and tools for removing originals from the output
• Visual differentiation for drafts
• Footnotes turn into margin notes when there’s enough space.

Install

git subtree (easiest!)

Copy the files into your repo using git subtree (this is way easier to use than submodules; here’s an explainer):

git subtree add --prefix themes/paperesque https://github.com/capnfabs/paperesque mainline --squash

This will add a commit to your repo with everything ready to go. You’ll probably want to modify parts of this theme for your own usage! Subtree makes that easy, because you’ve just copied the code into your repo ✨

git submodules

If you’re sure you want to use git submodules:

git submodule add -b mainline https://github.com/capnfabs/paperesque themes/paperesque

Select the theme in your config.toml

Add / Modify the theme field in your config.toml for your hugo site:

theme = "paperesque"

Using Features

FYI: the Home Page is Config-driven

When you first install and switch to the theme, you might find that your homepage is blank. That’s because all the links on the homepage are specified in your config.toml. Set it up like this:

[[params.menu]]
  name = "blog"
  url = "posts/"

[[params.menu]]
  name = "tags"
  url = "tags/"

[[params.menu]]
  name = "about"
  url = "about/"

[[params.menu]]
  name = "contact"
  url = "contact/"

Links in the top-right corner

These are also config driven! Add this to your config.toml (for example):

[[params.topmenu]]
  name = "about"
  url = "about/"

[[params.topmenu]]
  name = "contact"
  url = "contact/"

[[params.topmenu]]
  name = "rss"
  url = "posts/index.xml"

Removing original images after resizing

The fitfigure shortcode is exactly the same as the figure shortcode, but it automatically resizes your images to fit the container, and provides different resolutions for different DPIs (1x, 2x).

Whenever you use this shortcode, the theme makes a mental note of the resource you specified.

Now, you need to do some configuration if you want the originals to be removed from the output.

First, add this to your site’s config.toml:

[outputs]
page = ["HTML", "droplist"]

Now, as part of your build process, run:

./themes/paperesque/buildscripts/drop-resources.py [hugo-output-directory]

(the Hugo output directory is usually ./public).

That’s it! Resized resources will be removed.

This is off by default because it peppers your build output with .droplist files, and if you’re not expecting them, it’s going to be an unpleasant surprise.

Visual differentiation for drafts

This one’s on, and can’t be switched off. Drafts have an orange stripey background everywhere. You can’t miss them.

Footnotes turn into margin notes

This is on by default.

You can switch it off site-wide by adding disableMarginNotes = true to your params in your config.toml, i.e.

[params]
disableMarginNotes = true

Alternatively, you can turn it off per-page by adding the disableMarginNotes = true to your front-matter for the page.

Testing against the example site

You can build the example site with this theme with:

cd exampleSite
hugo serve --themesDir=../..

Hacking / Modifying the JS

The javascript in use (static/js/main.js) is built from the ./js/ directory. Here are instructions for how to modify the JS:

Set up

First, you need to install the yarn package manager.

Then, run:

yarn install

to install the required dependencies.

Dev builds

Run:

parcel watch --out-dir static/js js/main.js

Simple as that!

Production builds (i.e. before you commit code / deploy code)

parcel build --no-source-maps --experimental-scope-hoisting --out-dir static/js js/main.js

Experimental Scope Hoisting inlines Parcel’s module loader. It shaves off like 2kB Gzipped. Laugh all you want, but that’s half a second at dial-up speeds 😉

Other resources

• The explanation for how a lot of this works is in this blog post, so take a look there if you get stuck or want to borrow some of the ideas without grabbing all of them.
• You can see who else is using this theme by searching Github for paperesque filename:config.toml (requires login).

See Also

• Academic
• Anubis
• Blonde
• Color Your World
• Gokarna