Tufte Suite

The companion plugin for the Tufte for Obsidian theme — sidenotes, figures, inline typography, and rendered backlinks in a single install, each switchable on its own.

This replaces the four separate plugins (Tufte Sidenotes, Tufte Figures, Tufte Inline, Tufte Backlinks). Their code lives on here as the Suite's four modules; the standalone repositories are archived and no longer updated.

The four modules

Every module can be turned off individually in Settings → Tufte Suite, so installing the Suite never forces a feature on you. Tufte Figures' own settings (drop interception, label prefix, quilt output folder) live in that same tab.

The plugin renders the structure; the Tufte theme supplies the typography. The modules stay dormant unless the Tufte theme is active.

Install

Tufte Suite is in Obsidian's community plugin directory: Settings → Community plugins → Browse → search Tufte Suite → Install → Enable. (Or open obsidian://show-plugin?id=tufte-suite.) The theme it accompanies is in the community themes directory as Tufte (obsidian://show-theme?name=Tufte).

Manual install still works: download main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css from the latest release, put all three in YourVault/.obsidian/plugins/tufte-suite/, then Settings → Community plugins → enable Tufte Suite.

Coming from the four standalone plugins

Disable Tufte Sidenotes, Tufte Figures, Tufte Inline, and Tufte Backlinks before enabling the Suite — running both renders everything twice. The Suite shows a notice if it detects one still enabled.

Nothing else is required. On first load the Suite imports each standalone plugin's settings and copies your existing image-quilt store into its own folder, reading the old folders without writing to them, so uninstalling the four is safe afterwards. Command IDs are unchanged (tufte-figures:insert-figure and friends), so hotkeys you had bound keep working.

Requirements

• Obsidian 1.4.0 or newer.
• Desktop and mobile. No network access, no telemetry, no build step to install.

How this plugin is built

main.js is generated, and the four modules are kept as real, separate sources under src/modules/. The build embeds each module's main.js byte-for-byte inside a CommonJS factory wrapper, then appends the Suite runtime that loads them as sub-plugins:

node build-tufte-suite.js

Do not hand-edit main.js — edit the module under src/modules/<id>/ and rebuild. The build refuses to run if the embedded bytes would not match their source, so the bundle can never silently drift from the modules it claims to contain. There is exactly one deliberate deviation from verbatim embedding: Tufte Figures' quilt-store path, rewritten to live under the Suite's own folder. styles.css is the modules' stylesheets concatenated in load order (Tufte Inline has none — its styling belongs to the theme).

Module load order — backlinks, figures, inline, sidenotes — is load-bearing rather than cosmetic: sidenotes and figures both register capture-phase document handlers and both claim marginnote callouts, and this order reproduces the behavior the four standalone plugins had.

Tests

An equivalence harness runs each module twice — once standalone, once through the Suite — in two isolated fake-Obsidian environments built on jsdom, and requires the rendered DOM to come out byte-identical:

cd tests
npm install
node run-all.js

Nine groups cover rendered output, command identity, registration and event ordering, settings import and persistence, the settings tab, module toggles, and the unload cascade. See tests/README.md for what the harness stubs and what it deliberately cannot reach (CodeMirror Live Preview decorations, canvas quilt generation, and real drag-and-drop need a human in Obsidian).

Credits

Built alongside the Tufte for Obsidian theme, adapted from Tufte CSS and Edward Tufte's book design.

License

MIT © 2026 Daocheng Lin.

Changelog

• 1.3.0 (2026-08-29)
  • Now, the Suite speaks 44 languages
  • Add companion typefaces for 19 scripts, Japanese included
  • Reorder companion scripts to pick Han character shapes
  • Fix a Reading-view figure showing the previous image
  • Pair with theme Tufte 1.19.0
• 1.2.0 (2026-08-14)
  • Now, the whole Suite speaks Chinese
  • Unify the figure modal's tabs with the settings tab bar
  • Pair with theme Tufte 1.18.0
• 1.1.0 (2026-08-14)
  • Add the Typefaces settings: Latin and Chinese faces and weights
  • Add pickers for installed system fonts
  • Requires theme Tufte 1.17.0
• 1.0.2 (2026-08-14)
  • Fix figure captions overlapping sidenotes
  • Align the left edges of margin content
• 1.0.1 (2026-08-11)
  • Inline shorthands now survive nested markup
• 1.0.0 (2026-08-05)
  • First release: the four Tufte plugins bundled as switchable modules