Colophon.

The faces

We set headlines in Newsreader, an open-licence face with a true optical axis: it gets finer as it gets bigger, which is why the hero’s italic keeps its hairlines. Body text is EB Garamond. There is no third face. The small annotations are Garamond again, in tracked capitals: captions, section marks, the kickers over each trade. The figures are Newsreader with lining tabular numerals: coordinates, days, pounds. A number stands at cap height beside its label, and a column of them lines up.

We serve the fonts from this site, not from a font network. Until they arrive, the page paints in Georgia with each face’s metrics applied, measured style by style, so nothing moves when the real type lands.

The plan

The drawing on the front page is the Circus, after John Wood the Elder’s plan of 1754. The page draws it live as vector linework: the construction circle first, then the axes, then the three terraces in the order they were built. With a mouse it takes on the conventions of a survey sheet: a crosshair with a graticule, and a PROJ. control that lifts the plan into the military projection an eighteenth-century draughtsman would recognise. If your system prefers reduced motion, the plan is simply there, complete.

Press the coordinates in the title block and the survey reads in the National Grid instead of degrees. Press the scale bar and it is set in metres, then chains, then feet again. Raised, the terraces cast the shadow the sun is throwing over Bath at that minute, worked out on your own machine from the date and the time. On 7 May the attribution line records the foundation stone, and on 23 May the death of John Wood the Elder, both in 1754.

The doors

The short forms are registered too. Arrive at bath.ltd or bath.ltd.uk and you are sent here, where the masthead opens as the abbreviation and unfurls to the full name. The missing letters are plain inline spans, so the line’s vertical metrics never move. You can watch it again on any page: add ?nameplate=ltd to the address.

Each section has a door of its own: /01 to /06 open the front page at § 01 to § 06. On a tablet the masthead reads Bath Ltd where the full name would push the links into a menu. DNS holds two notes as well: a LOC record gives the registered office to the second of arc, and a TXT record says who we are.

The paper

The palette is called Ink & Stone: Bath limestone for the sheet, a purple-navy ink for the words, and one claret accent for marks. The paper has a fine grain. We print photographs as duotone plates so they sit in the ink rather than on top of it.

The print edition

Print the front page and you do not get a screen layout squeezed onto A4. The page stands down and a four-page journal takes the paper, set for print from the start. Add ?imposition=booklet to the address and the four pages come out on two landscape sheets, imposed to fold into an A5 booklet. Print this page and it comes out as a specimen of the two faces. Try it from your print menu, or download the copy below.

Nothing watching

No analytics, no trackers, and one cookie, set only if you choose a language. Every request this page makes goes to this site and nowhere else, fonts and images included. There is no consent banner because a cookie that carries only your own choice does not need one.

If you pin a theme, that choice is kept in a key on your own device and nowhere else; set it back to auto and even that is erased. The language you read the sheet in is kept the same way, and also as a cookie, bl-lang: two letters, set when you press the language stamp, read the Welsh sheet or come in by /en, and sent to this site alone, so the front door leaves you on the sheet you chose. An enquiry is read by a small program of ours and lands in our inbox; it is used to reply to you and for nothing else. The privacy page has the detail.

There are no accounts here and nothing to sign in to. A password manager that asks for /.well-known/change-password is sent to this paragraph.

The press

We build the site statically with Astro and serve it as flat files: no database, no application server. The styles travel inside the page, so the whole front sheet, journal included, arrives as one compressed document of about fifty-five kilobytes. Scripts run only if they match a fingerprint taken at build time, and the site tells browsers to use HTTPS here for a year at a time. A small service worker keeps the last copy you read, so the sheet opens without a connection; if there is none, an offline plate lists the sheets this device holds and when each was last printed.

Every response carries the impression it was printed from, the short hash of the commit, in an X-Impression header; hold the pointer on the name in the baseline and it is there too. An X-Clacks-Overhead header goes out with every page, for Terry Pratchett. Our PGP key is published by Web Key Directory, so gpg --locate-keys hello@bath.limited finds it from the address alone, and the fingerprint sits on the email link.

We build for clients the same way. If you would like a site made like this, write to us.

The keys

Four keys work on the front page. P raises the plan and lays it flat, N redraws it, and J and K step down and up the section marks. A fifth, the full stop, works on the headline’s own full stop too, and adds a fourth face to the theme stamp in the baseline: slider, which shows the sheet in light and dark together, with a rule you drag between them. It is not offered straight away; take the stamp round twice more and it is there the third time. Once it is offered, the stop is a stop again.

Copy more than a line from the sheet and the source goes with it: the address, the section mark and the edition. Away from the tab, the title shows the section you were reading. On a phone, hold the mark and it turns by the compass to lie as the Circus lies on the ground.

The sheet keeps a roster of what a browser has found: the short name unfurling, the plan raised, the survey read in the grid, the grassroots edition opened, the stamp set to slider. With all five seen, the masthead is set in the town’s Roman name, Aquae Sulis. Press it at the top of the front page and a day passes over the Circus, then the name goes back to Bath Limited; pressed anywhere else, it goes to the top of the front page first, and pressing it there offers Aquae Sulis again. Add ?nameplate=bath to the address to lock the drawer.

The sheet