Tarn

A quiet, Diátaxis-aware documentation theme for Zensical.

Read the docs and try Tarn
The documentation site uses Tarn itself.

Tarn combines calm colours, legible type and Diátaxis navigation in a restrained layout for documentation.

• Diátaxis navigation cues. Recognised sections get coloured dots on navigation tabs or sidebar headings. Recognised page URLs receive a Tutorial, How-to guide, Reference or Explanation badge by default. You can override individual badges or disable badges and navigation decoration separately. Unrecognised sections use quieter, secondary styling by default.
• Light and dark palettes draw on the same mountain lake by day and night: warm cloud-grey and starlit indigo. In dark mode, you read cool off-white text against a deep blue-violet sky. The palettes follow the reader's system preference by default, unless the reader saves a choice. Projects can choose their starting mode.
• Legible type: Atkinson Hyperlegible Next and Mono.
• Flat and focused: a neutral header, thin dividing lines, five admonition tones for Zensical's twelve types, and inline code that stands out from prose and links.
• Tabs or sidebar: works with navigation.tabs (default) or navigation.sections.
• Contrast checked: the default text/background token pairs pass the generator’s 4.5:1 checks in both themes.

Install

Tarn requires Python 3.11 or newer and pins Zensical to version 0.0.73. See the configuration reference for dependency details.

With an active virtual environment, install Tarn from PyPI:

python -m pip install zensical-tarn

This also installs Zensical. Select the theme in your project's configuration:

# zensical.toml
[project.theme]
name = "tarn"

Zensical can also read mkdocs.yml with the equivalent theme selection. MkDocs itself has not been verified:

theme:
  name: tarn

Tarn styles the navigation you configure in Zensical and preserves its order. Folders such as tutorials/, how-to/, reference/ and explanation/ have built-in classifications. The homepage defaults to primary styling. Unknown URL sections default to secondary styling. Use project.extra.tarn.sections to map existing folders or mark a section as primary. The first-site tutorial covers a working site, and Name your sections explains custom mappings.

You can add your own logo, adjust colours and change the fonts through Zensical configuration.

Screenshots

Light	Dark

More in screenshots/.

Documentation

The theme's own documentation, built with Tarn: https://axelvoitier.github.io/zensical-tarn/

Licence

Copyright Axel Voitier. Original Tarn material is licensed under Apache 2.0. Includes modified Zensical templates under MIT; see NOTICE and the upstream licence. The combined package metadata records Apache-2.0 AND MIT. Fonts are fetched from Google Fonts, with self-hosting instructions.