Tidy
A focused CSS library
for tidy typesetting.
✓ Ridiculously tiny. 240 bytes minzipped the last time I checked.
✓ Brings structure. Professional typographic rhythm, and opt-in plugins:
- a real baseline grid (coming soon)
- professional tables (coming soon)
- proper sub- and superscripts (coming soon)
- drop caps (coming soon)
- rules and borders (coming soon)
✓ Works out of the box. With any font, any layout, any stylesheet, and any framework.
✓ Tweakable. If you're pedantic like me, you can fine-tune every single aspect of it.
Online typesetting?
In its original sense, typesetting is the art of arranging cast metal sorts (characters) and slugs (spaces) into lines. These lines would then be clustered together into a forme and transfer ink onto a page.
A typesetter had an eye for proportion, excellent manual skills, and lots of patience. Today typesetting is almost always done digitally, with very powerful tools like Adobe InDesign.
CSS has never had any typesetting tools. So getting it right has meant a lot of manual labour – much like in the old times. This article by Espen Brunborg should give you an idea.
A CSS library?
There are swarms of CSS frameworks out there – some of them already solve the problem of typesetting to some extent. But why pull in over 100 kB of CSS when you just need one or two simple solutions?
Tidy is different. It's not a framework – it's a CSS library. It solves just one complex problem – online typesetting.
Tidy does one thing and does it well. It integrates well with your stylesheets, and with any existing CSS framework.
Focused?
Tidy is focused on the single problem it solves. In most cases it will set no more than four properties:
- the font size
- the line height
- top and bottom padding
- top and bottom margins
All the rest is up to you or up to the framework you're using.
Usage
Work in progress.