Offprint

A Jekyll theme for academic personal sites. One column of well-set text, no sidebar, no avatar, no icon fonts, no JavaScript.

See the live demo →

Light	Dark

Dark mode follows the reader's system setting — there is no toggle and no JavaScript.

An offprint is a separately printed copy of a single journal article — what academics used to mail to colleagues who asked for their work. The theme is built for the same job: put the work in front of someone with as little between them and it as possible.

• Source Serif 4 for text, IBM Plex Sans for metadata, both self-hosted (~108 KB) — no Google Fonts request, no third-party connection
• Dark mode via prefers-color-scheme, contrast-checked to WCAG AA
• Publications as structured data, rendered by a template
• Dates and years hang in the left margin on wide screens
• One layout, four includes, one stylesheet — small enough to read in full

Install

Add to your site's _config.yml:

remote_theme: gojiplus/jekyll-theme-offprint
plugins:
  - jekyll-remote-theme

And to your Gemfile:

group :jekyll_plugins do
  gem "jekyll-remote-theme"
end

jekyll-remote-theme is not supported by GitHub's classic Pages builder in all cases; deploying via GitHub Actions is the reliable path. The demo site's .github/workflows/pages.yml is a working example you can copy verbatim.

Configure

Jekyll themes distribute only _layouts, _includes, _sass, and assets — so _data/ stays with your site. Nothing breaks without it (a missing data file renders as an empty nav rather than an error), but you will want all three.

_config.yml

title: "Your Name"
description: "One sentence used as the default meta description."
url: "https://yourname.github.io"
baseurl: ""

author:
  short_name: "Y. Name"      # bolded automatically in publication bylines
  role: "Your Title · Your Institution"
  email: "you@example.edu"
  googlescholar: "https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=..."
  github: "https://github.com/you"
  bluesky: "https://bsky.app/profile/you"
  orcid: "https://orcid.org/0000-..."
  linkedin: "https://www.linkedin.com/in/you"

google_analytics: "G-XXXXXXXXXX"   # omit entirely to emit no analytics
noindex: false                     # true on a staging site to block indexing

# Favicons. The theme ships none -- these point at files in your own repo.
# Any you omit emit no <link> at all.
favicon: /images/favicon.ico
favicon_svg: /images/favicon.svg
apple_touch_icon: /images/apple-touch-icon-180x180.png
webmanifest: /images/manifest.json

Every one of these is optional. An absent key emits no markup at all — no empty tags, no bare mailto:, no analytics snippet with a blank id.

_data/navigation.yml

- title: About
  url: /
- title: Research
  url: /research/
- title: CV
  url: /files/cv.pdf

The active-page highlight maintains itself by comparing page.url to each item's url.

_data/social.yml

Controls footer link order and labels; the URLs come from author: above. A row whose author key is unset renders nothing — deleting the key in _config.yml is how you remove a link.

- key: email
  label: Email
  prefix: "mailto:"
- key: googlescholar
  label: Scholar
- key: github
  label: GitHub

_data/publications.yml

- title: "Paper title in sentence case"
  authors: ["A. Coauthor", "Y. Name", "B. Coauthor"]
  year: 2025
  venue: "Journal Name"
  status: published          # published | forthcoming | wip
  pdf: /files/paper.pdf
  doi: "https://doi.org/..."
  abstract: >
    Shown in a collapsible <details> block.

title and status are required; authors is required except for wip; year is required for published. Everything else is optional and omitted cleanly when absent. note replaces the byline for entries without authors.

The hanging label is the year for published work, the word Forthcoming for forthcoming, and nothing for works in progress. Author separators are generated — A, B, and C for three or more, A and B for two — and whichever author matches author.short_name is bolded, so your name can never fall out of sync across entries.

Render them with:

{% for item in site.data.publications %}{% unless item.status == 'wip' %}{% include publication.html pub=item %}{% endunless %}{% endfor %}

Pages

Pages set layout: default and, optionally, title, description, and permalink. title is used for the <title> tag and nothing else — headings belong in the page body, so the masthead stays the only <h1> on the page.

Customising

The whole design is CSS custom properties at the top of assets/css/style.css. Override them in your own stylesheet, loaded after the theme's:

:root {
  --accent: #2f5d8a;
  --serif: "Your Serif", Georgia, serif;
}

The dark palette is a second :root block inside a prefers-color-scheme: dark media query — no rule is duplicated, so overriding a property changes both schemes unless you override it inside the query too.

If you change --accent, check it against --paper in both schemes. The shipped values measure 8.3:1 light and 7.5:1 dark.

Demo content

The demo site in this repo — Rowan Ellery, Northgate University, the publications, the news items — is entirely fictional and exists only to show the theme with realistically shaped content. The bundled PDFs say so on their first line. None of it is distributed to sites using the theme.

Licence

MIT, except the bundled fonts: Source Serif 4 (© Adobe) and IBM Plex Sans (© IBM Corp.) are under the SIL Open Font License 1.1, with their notices in assets/fonts/. See LICENSE.