About

About the Inkstone theme.

What is Inkstone?

Inkstone is a minimal Hugo theme built for longreads — articles that reward slow reading. It is opinionated about CJK typography and ships with 25+ content shortcodes for embedding rich media.

Design principles

  1. Content first — Every visual decision serves reading. No animation theatrics, no autoplay, no popups.
  2. CJK-native — Mixed Chinese/English text gets proper line-height, character-based reading time, and font fallback chains tuned for mainland readers.
  3. Bilingual by default — defaultContentLanguageInSubdir = false keeps the primary language at root URLs; secondary languages get /en/ (or vice versa). Translation is built into the data model, not bolted on.
  4. Progressive enhancement — JS is optional. Pagefind search, lightbox, theme toggle all degrade gracefully.

Tech stack

  • Hugo extended ≥ 0.128 (uses built-in css.TailwindCSS)
  • Tailwind v4 with @import "tailwindcss" and @theme design tokens
  • 25+ content shortcodes covering admonitions, galleries, video, audio, code blocks, math, diagrams
  • Optional Pagefind for client-side search (theme provides ⌘K modal; you wire up pagefind --site public in your build)

Quick start

hugo new site mysite
cd mysite
git submodule add https://github.com/BerBai/inkstone themes/inkstone
echo 'theme = "inkstone"' >> hugo.toml
hugo server

For full setup including i18n, taxonomies, and shortcode usage, see the README .

Credits

  • LXGW WenKai webfont — © Lin Xiang Wei, OFL license
  • Noto Serif SC webfont — © Google, OFL license
  • Heroicons / Phosphor icons — MIT license