illum

Ornament for web pages, written by a simulated pen

Once a scribe had finished a book, a rubricator went over it with red ink and a finer pen. illum does the same for a web page. It puts a large initial where the text opens, a paraph where a paragraph turns to a new point, a filler in the empty end of a short line, a mark between chapters, and a frame round a quotation, a figure or a block of code. It finds these places in the page’s own markup, and a simulated pen writes each mark in ink.

Each style is taken from objects studied at full size in museum and library scans. The line in Tarot is traced from Conver’s cards in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. The planetary signs in Occult are the ones a scribe wrote in Wellcome MS 4670, about 1725. The sources are listed on each style’s page.

The words are left alone. The text is laid out and shown first, and the ornament is drawn a moment later on a layer behind it. Screen readers read the text and nothing else. The same text gets the same ornament on every visit.

Using it

One call, on the element that holds the text:

import { rubricate } from './kit/illum.js';

rubricate(article, { style: 'tarot' });

The options, the markup it looks for and the colours it reads are on the Use page.

Why

You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both.

illum is a program, and so a tool in Ruskin’s sense. Its lines keep the irregularities a hand makes, and each one has a cause: the pen slowing at a turn, the ink running low, a stencil laid a little off the line. The Principles page says what else we hold to.