Reading a Sheet
- Issued
- Revised
- Extent
- 3 min read · 481 words
- By
- Your Name
- Subject
- reference, typography
- Also in
- Deutsch
Contents
Every page in this theme is a drawing sheet. The ruled block under the title is the title block: on a real drawing it states what the sheet is, who drew it, when, and at which revision. Here it carries the same fields, as an actual bordered table rather than a grey caption line that the eye skips on its way to the first paragraph.
What the title block records
Each row is fed by one front matter key, and a row that has nothing to say is not ruled at all — an empty field on a drawing is a defect, not a placeholder.
The post you are reading has a lastmod more than a day after its date, which is why it shows a
Revised row. Remove that key and the row disappears; the block closes up around it.
| Field | Source | Shown when |
|---|---|---|
| Issued | date | always |
| Revised | Lastmod | it differs from date by more than a day |
| Extent | reading time, word count | ShowReadingTime / ShowWordCount |
| By | author | the key is set |
| Subject | tags | the post has tags |
| Also in | translations | the post exists in another language |
The reading column
The column runs to 92 characters at the 20px body size, well past the classic 65–75 advice. That is a deliberate trade for technical writing, where the substance is command blocks and terminal output that should not wrap:
$ hugo --gc --minify
Start building sites …
│ EN │ DE
──────────────────┼────┼────
Pages │ 24 │ 21
Processed images │ 6 │ 6
Total in 211 ms
The line height carries the cost of that width: at 1.75 a 92-character line stays trackable, and
the return sweep still lands on the right row. Both numbers were measured from a rendered line
rather than estimated — a characters-per-pixel guess is reliably wrong.
Note
Written as a plain Markdown blockquote opening with [!NOTE]. No shortcode and no raw HTML, which
matters because Goldmark’s unsafe is off.
The zone rail
The lettered strip down the left edge of the frame is not decoration. Each letter is one top-level heading in this post, and each is a link. On a page with nothing to index — a profile page, a short note — the rail does not render, because lettering an empty field would be a lie about the drawing.
Tip
The rail follows ## headings only. If a post reads as one continuous argument, give it no
sections and it gets no rail.
Alerts
Five kinds, all plain Markdown:
Important
Notes and tips carry the signal amber; warnings and cautions carry the danger colour. Only one accent is ever live on a screen at a time.
Warning
A wide table scrolls inside its own container rather than pushing the page sideways. Try the one above on a narrow window.
Caution
Colour is never the only carrier: every alert is labelled in words as well.