How to Create a Distill Article

A collection of examples and best practices for creating interactive explanatory articles using the Distill web framework

Distill ships with a CSS framework and a collection of custom web components that make building interactive academic articles easier than raw HTML, CSS and JavaScript. This reference article details several examples and best practices for how to use both frameworks. Both are also available on Github with a permissive license, so feel free to use them independent of http://distill.pub as well.

Setting up a Document

If you’re using Chrome as your development browser, here is the smallest distill post.

<script src="../dist/template.min.js"></script> <dt-article> <h1>Hello World</h1> </dt-article>

However, this omits some required html tags that might cause rendering problems during development if you’re using a browser other than Chrome. These missing tags will be added during publishing, so if the above works for you, feel free to use it. If you are having issues with weird characters showing up, try adding doctype and meta tags explicitly.

<!doctype html> <meta charset="utf-8"> <script src="../dist/template.min.js"></script> <dt-article> <h1>Hello World</h1> </dt-article>

A typical distill post will be quite a bit longer than this though. Below is a more complete example. Don’t worry if some of the tags don’t make sense, they’re all documented further in this post.

<!doctype html> <meta charset="utf-8"> <script src="../dist/template.min.js"></script> <dt-article> <h1>Hello World</h1> <h2>A description of the post</h2> <dt-byline></dt-byline> </dt-article> <dt-bibliography></dt-bibliography>

Markdown

Markdown is supported as an alternative to html for the <dt-article> element.

<!doctype html> <meta charset="utf-8"> <script src="../dist/template.min.js"></script> <dt-article markdown> ###Hello World ##A description of the post First paragraph of the article. </dt-article> <dt-bibliography></dt-bibliography>

We use marked as the rendering engine, with github flavored markdown and smartypants enabled. In development mode the markdown is translated in the client after the dom content has loaded, but when published the translation is precompiled.

Data

Layouts

The main text column is referred to as the body. It is the assumed layout of any direct descendents of the dt-article element.

.l-body

.l-middle

.l-page

Occasionally you’ll want to use the full browser width. For this, use screen. You can also inset the element a little from the edge of the browser by appending, you guessed it, inset.

.l-screen

.l-screen-inset

Often you want to position smaller images so as not to completely interrupt the flow of your text. Or perhaps you want to put some text in the margin as an aside or to signal that it’s optional content. For these cases we’ll use the float-based .side layouts.

.l-body.side

.l-page.side

They are all floated to the right and anchored to the right-hand edge of the position you specify. By default, each will take up approximately half of the width of the standard layout position, but you can override the width with a more specific selector.

.l-gutter

The final layout is for marginalia, asides, and footnotes. It does not interrupt the normal flow of .l-body sized text except on mobile screen sizes.

Code Blocks

Syntax highlighting is provided within <dt-code> tags. An example of inline code snippets: <dt-code language="html">let x = 10;</dt-code>. For larger blocks of code, add a block attribute:

<dt-code block language="javascript"> var x = 25; function(x){ return x * x; } </dt-code>

Citation

Bibtex is the supported way of making academic citations. You first need have a global definition of all your possible citations. This can either be inlined in the document, or it can reference an external bibtex file.

<dt-bibliography> @article{gregor2015draw, title={DRAW: A recurrent neural network for image generation}, author={Gregor, Karol and Danihelka, Ivo and Graves, Alex and Rezende, Danilo Jimenez and Wierstra, Daan}, journal={arXivreprint arXiv:1502.04623}, year={2015} } @article{mercier2011humans, title={Why do humans reason? Arguments for an argumentative theory}, author={Mercier, Hugo and Sperber, Dan}, journal={Behavioral and brain sciences}, volume={34}, number={02}, pages={57--74}, year={2011}, publisher={Cambridge Univ Press} } </dt-bibliography>

Citations are then used with the <dt-cite> tag.

<dt-cite>gregor2015draw</dt-cite>

Take a look at this paper gregor2015draw.

Math

Footnotes

This is a

HTML Includes

Authors

Contributions

List of who did what