The Tufte style brings Edward Tufte’s design principles from four decades of information visualization into your AsciiDoc documents. Based on his seminal works The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information, Visual Explanations, and Beautiful Evidence.

Features

  • ET Book typography: The free typeface developed for Beautiful Evidence, optimized for screen display
  • Sidenotes: Footnotes automatically appear as numbered sidenotes in the margin
  • Sidebar blocks as marginals: Unnumbered text blocks in the margin for glossary entries, cross-references, and context
  • Booktabs tables: Three horizontal rules only, no vertical lines, small-caps headers
  • Margin graphics: Place small images in the margin with the .margin role
  • Italic headings: Elegant, flat hierarchy following Tufte’s recommendations
  • Running headers: Chapter title and page numbers in the PDF export

Installation

  1. Download the .adocstyle.zip file
  2. Extract the archive
  3. Double-click the Tufte.adocstyle bundle to install

The style appears in the document settings under Tufte.

Limitations

This style uses a CSS workaround for sidenotes that has some constraints:

  • Overflow possible: Many sidenotes on the same page can extend beyond the page boundary
  • No automatic page breaks: Sidenotes cannot split across pages

Keep footnotes concise and avoid clustering too many on the same page.

Read our detailed blog post for the full story behind the style.