Newspaper

Newspaper

A minimalist newspaper theme for Obsidian.

Editorial typography in the spirit of the finer papers — warm ivory paper, a quiet interface, and serifs that are a pleasure to read and to write with. Think the article pages of the Financial Times or Anthropic's essays, not an industrial dashboard.

Typography first

• Notes are set in a classic text serif — Charter, Iowan Old Style, or Georgia, whichever your system has — with generous 1.7 leading and a comfortable ~42 em column. No font files are bundled and no network is used: the theme works offline, on desktop and mobile, out of the box.
• The interface is set in Georgia — the classic screen serif — at small, quiet sizes, so the whole app reads like one printed page.
• Old-style figures in running text; lining tabular figures in tables and code, where numbers must line up.
• A restrained heading scale with tightened tracking on the display sizes. The note title acts as a masthead with a hairline rule; H2 section heads carry thin column-divider rules; H5 is set in small caps; and H6 works as a kicker — the little uppercase label newspapers place above a headline.

Newspaper furniture

• Blockquotes read as pull quotes: italic serif against a slim clay rule.
• --- renders as the classic double rule between sections.
• Tables are financial-page tables: horizontal hairlines only, a strong opening rule, and letterspaced uppercase column heads.
• Callouts become sidebar boxes — hairline frame, the faintest wash of colour, uppercase sans label.
• Links are underlined the way newspapers do it: a hairline underline that darkens on hover.

Warm, not industrial

• Light mode is warm ivory paper with near-black warm ink and a clay/claret accent.
• Dark mode is a warm charcoal — newsprint under a reading lamp, never pure black.
• Every grey is mixed with a little brown; the palette of section colours (used by callouts and highlights) is muted and ink-like in both modes.

The images above are previews rendered from the theme's palette and type styles; exact appearance in Obsidian depends on your platform's fonts and settings.

Installation

From the community themes

In Obsidian, open Settings → Appearance → Themes → Manage, search for Newspaper, and select Use. If the theme is not listed yet — the directory submission may still be under review — install it manually or via BRAT below.

Manual

1. In your vault, create the folder .obsidian/themes/Newspaper/.
2. Copy manifest.json and theme.css from this repository into it.
3. In Obsidian, open Settings → Appearance → Themes and select Newspaper.

Via BRAT

If you use the BRAT plugin, add mladenpr/Newspaper as a beta theme.

Recommended fonts (optional)

Newspaper looks right out of the box on macOS, Windows, iOS and Android. If you want to get even closer to the FT / Anthropic article feel, install one of these free text serifs — the theme picks Charter up automatically, or set the others under Settings → Appearance → Font:

• Charter — bundled with macOS/iOS already; a superb, screen-tuned text serif.
• Source Serif 4 — warm, contemporary, excellent at text sizes.
• Newsreader — designed specifically for on-screen news text.

Tips

• The accent colour follows your own choice in Settings → Appearance → Accent color; leave it untouched to keep the theme's clay/claret default.
• Turn on Readable line length for the proper single-column measure.
• Write ###### like this above a heading for a newspaper-style kicker.
• The interface defaults to Georgia; your own choice under Settings → Appearance → Font always wins, so set a sans there if you prefer quieter chrome. Note text is controlled separately under Text font.
• The theme keeps the window frame opaque paper even when Settings → Appearance → Translucent window is on — no grey glass. If you still see system material anywhere (macOS Liquid Glass), turn that setting off.

Versioning and releases

Newspaper uses Semantic Versioning; the rules for what counts as a patch, minor, or major change — and the release procedure — are documented in VERSIONING.md. Every notable change is recorded in the CHANGELOG. Releases are published automatically by a GitHub Actions workflow when a version tag is pushed.

License

MIT