Scriptorium

A quiet desk for long thoughts.

Chinese | Japanese

A warm, minimal Obsidian theme for long-form reading and writing.

Scriptorium keeps the writing surface primary: soft paper tones, restrained contrast, quiet workspace chrome, flatter tags and callouts, and typography tuned for mixed CJK and Latin notes.

[!NOTE] Scriptorium is a personal aesthetic. It does not aim to support the Style Settings plugin.

Install

1. Search for Scriptorium in Obsidian Community Themes.
2. Click Install and use.

Manual install: copy theme.css and manifest.json into .obsidian/themes/Scriptorium/, then select Scriptorium in Appearance -> Themes.

Design

• Recommended fonts: IBM Plex Sans, IBM Plex Serif, IBM Plex Mono.
• Scriptorium applies its own font stacks (IBM Plex family with CJK fallbacks); the Appearance font settings are not applied.
• Document surfaces stay light: texture, shadow, and accent color are deliberately restrained.
• Navigation, search, menus, tags, callouts, and embeds stay quiet so prose remains central.
• The theme ships as a single theme.css with no external dependencies.

Design Principles

Guidelines the theme is edited against, kept for future maintenance:

• Keep the warm paper palette restrained.
• Keep the surface clean enough that texture supports the page instead of competing with it.
• Prefer typographic hierarchy over heavy chrome.
• Keep auto-hide behavior limited, predictable, and easy to ignore when reading.
• Use accent colors carefully when they carry semantic meaning in body-sized text.
• Keep callouts, embeds, and floating UI aligned with the same material language, but avoid making routine operational UI feel like stacked cards.
• Keep tags quiet enough to annotate prose without competing with headings or links.
• Treat reading comfort as more important than decorative novelty.

Created by @ouatis. Inspired by Sanctum and Baseline.