How this site is drawn

A ledger, a broadsheet, a drawing

Victoria 3 runs from 1836 to 1936: the century of the account book, the daily paper and the engineering drawing. V3X is engine work with numbers attached, so the site borrows from all three and from nothing later.

What it refuses: gradients, glass, glow, rounded cards, emoji, stock charts, a centred hero. Corners are square. The only shadow is the brass offset under the primary button, a print register mark, which closes when pressed.

Ink and paper, blueprint by night

12 tokens, two schemes. Light is ledger paper and iron-gall ink, taken from the repo's own diagrams (docs/assets/banner.svg: paper, navy, teal, brass, red). Dark is a blueprint: the same navy as ground, paper as ink. The scheme follows the system setting; there is no switch to load.

Contrast, computed

WCAG 2 contrast for every pair a text token is allowed on. Body text needs 4.5:1; the focus ring, a UI mark, needs 3:1. The build fails below the floor.

Three faces, nine sizes

Display: Old Standard TT 400, 400 italic, 700 (OFL). A revival of the 'Modern' romans of the late 19th century: the face of the period's newspapers, statute books and engineering catalogues.

Text: Source Serif 4 variable, optical sizes 8-60, weights 200-900 (OFL). A transitional serif with optical sizes, so 15 px captions stay sturdy and 21 px ledes stay fine. Readable for long docs.

Mono: IBM Plex Mono 400, 500 (OFL). Tabular figures by construction: every digit is the same width, so columns of seconds and megabytes line up like a ledger.

All three are served from this site (/fonts/, latin subset, SIL Open Font License). No font CDN. If they fail, the stacks fall back to Georgia and Consolas, which the repo's diagrams already use.

Text uses old-style figures, which sit in a sentence like lower-case letters. Tables, code and figures switch to lining, tabular figures so that digits stack in columns.

The module: 6 px, a nonpareil

Printers of the period named their type sizes; six-point type was nonpareil, the size of footnotes and the width of a column rule. The site's module is 6 px. Every margin, gap and line height is a whole number of modules, so text in neighbouring columns sits on the same lines.

72 modules of 6 px, a major mark every 36 px.

Twelve columns and a margin for numerals

The page is at most 1176 px wide: 12 columns with 24 px gutters. Sections give two columns to their numeral, as a statute book gives its margin to section numbers, and ten to the text. Running text stops at 64ch, about twelve words a line. Below 900 px the margin folds above the text; below 720 px everything is one column.

Rules, in the printer's sense

Data set as type

A figure is a table first: label, value, unit, readable by a screen reader and by search. The bar is decoration drawn from the same number. Before is hatched in red, like an engraver's shading; with V3X is solid teal. Hairlines mark each quarter of the scale. The caption names the machine.

Components

Words

• Plain, short, sentence case. Write for a player who has never heard of a DLL; put the technical word second, in code.
• Numbers only from the V3X repository, always with the machine they were measured on. Say what is optional and off by default next to its number.
• Say what is not done yet. An illustration says it is not a screenshot.
• Portuguese is Brazilian Portuguese; the docs for modders stay in English and links to them say so.

Rules, and what checks them