Gloss is an Astro theme for a personal blog of long essays, for people who want their writing to read like a page someone has been reading with a pencil. The text is set in a book face at a comfortable measure, and to its right is a wide margin where your footnotes appear in handwriting, beside the paragraph they belong to. Write footnotes the usual Markdown way, <code>[^1]</code>, and the build moves each one into the margin.
How it reads
- Gelasio for the essays and titles, Geist for the interface, Caveat for the notes in the margin
- On a phone each note sits under its paragraph with a pencil rule; long notes switch to small print, because nobody wants a paragraph of handwriting
- <code>==highlight==</code> and <code>++underline++</code> add a highlighter stroke and a pencil underline, in posts and in the home page's opening line
- One pencil colour and one highlighter. No cards and no shadows
- Dark mode, and a layout that holds at 360px
What's included
- Home with an opening line and a handwritten note, posts, an archive by year, an About page with margin notes too, and 404
- Margin notes numbered in reading order, and one setting to turn them back into ordinary footnotes
- Maths with KaTeX and chemical formulas with mhchem, set at build time, in posts and margin notes
- Word counts and reading times, RSS, sitemap and structured data
- Every word the theme prints in one place in the config, for sites in other languages
- Astro 7, Tailwind CSS v4, static output; the only script is the theme toggle and the note spacing. Lighthouse 95+ on mobile, checked in CI
- AGENTS.md, a map of the edit points for Claude Code and Cursor
- MIT, with one footer credit line that is easy to remove
Gloss Pro adds ways to find, mark up and keep up with what you write: Pagefind search that reads the margin notes, hand-drawn circles, strike-throughs and brackets as MDX components, contents in the margin, series, topics, a reading log, a subscribe form and comments, a share card per post with its handwritten note, four colour presets and a second font pairing. See it at gloss.ondelva.com.
