Paper and ink, on purpose
Most documentation themes reach for the same defaults: white #fff, a grotesque sans, gray-800 text, system dark mode. They read fine and look like nothing. This system starts from a different premise — a long technical document is a thing you read for an hour — and the tokens follow from it.
§1The stance
An hour of reading wants what print figured out centuries ago: a warm ground that doesn't glare, a text face with real contrast between strokes, and a layout rhythm measured in ems of body text rather than pixels of chrome. Hence the vocabulary the token layer is written in: papers (纸 the sheet, 页 the page, 素 the plain ground, 帛 the silk) instead of gray-50 through gray-200; inks and pigments from a painter's box — 朱 wine, 石 burnt orange, 赭 ochre, 黛 teal, 紫 violet — instead of primary/secondary/accent. The names are not decoration: they keep every new color decision anchored to the same physical metaphor, which is why five different surfaces still read as one sheet of paper.
§2Two grounds, because two kinds of page
A wiki is read two ways. You read a note — one column, an hour, the eyes want calm: a slightly cool paper, a neutral ink, one accent for links and numbers. You browse a shelf — a grid of cards, a glance, a choice: the paper can be warmer, the titles can be a display serif, the accent can be a deep wine that reads as a mark rather than a link. Giving those two situations one palette would compromise both. So the semantic tier has two contexts — the reading column (--color-*) and the browse shelf (--wb-*) — drawn from one box of pigments, and a page declares which one it is. The result is a site that feels like one object and two rooms.
§3Dark is a second edition, not an inversion
Algorithmic dark modes invert lightness and call it done; text becomes chalk on slate and every tinted surface turns to mud. Here the dark theme is a second hand-set edition: dusk grounds and moon-white inks chosen on their own, accent pigments re-brightened just enough to hold their AA contrast on the darker papers. It costs a second set of decisions — that is the point. The switch honors the reader's explicit choice only (never the OS preference), because a page that flips its own theme mid-read is a page that startles.
§4CJK is load-bearing
Mixed Chinese/Latin text is where most themes quietly fall apart: emphasis that refuses to close against a full-width period, code diagrams that shear because a Hanzi is 1.7 cells wide. Both are treated here as correctness bugs, not typographic taste — the dialect parses CJK emphasis correctly, and the code font subset pins a Hanzi to exactly two cells so box-drawing survives translation. A theme that only works in English is half a theme.