Customizing your head

Let’s start with the most basic and perhaps most useful customization: modifying the <head>. This is useful for adding your own CSS and JavaScript files, changing certain metadata, or adding icons.

First, copy the head partial from the theme (theme/contentful/layouts/partials/head.html) to your own (layouts/partials/head.html). We’re simply taking advantage of Hugo’s lookup order where we’ve override the head partial with our own copy.

Then, feel free to add your own (or others') scripts and stylesheets, icons and other metadata, or whatever suitable things.

In my case, I often use certain JavaScript libraries like MathJax for mathematical typesetting, Prism for syntax highlighting, and medium-zoom for interactive image zooms.

Here’s the modified code. (The example code is snipped for brevity.)

<!--snip-->

{{- /* MathJax */ -}}
<script src="https://polyfill.io/v3/polyfill.min.js?features=es6"></script>
<script id="MathJax-script" defer src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/mathjax@3/es5/tex-mml-chtml.js"></script>

{{- /* Prism.js */ -}}
<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/prism/1.20.0/themes/prism-tomorrow.min.css" type="text/css">
<script defer src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/prism/1.20.0/components/prism-core.min.js"></script>
<script defer src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/prism/1.20.0/plugins/autoloader/prism-autoloader.min.js">
<script defer src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/prism/1.20.0/plugins/keep-markup/prism-keep-markup.min.js">

{{- /* medium-zoom */ -}}
<script defer src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/medium-zoom@1.0.5/dist/medium-zoom.min.js"></script>
<script>window.addEventListener('load', () => mediumZoom('article img', { 'background': 'rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.75)' }))</script>

Since most of the JavaScript libraries used here are not really a requirement (except for MathJax for mathematical typesetting), I’ve set them to be loaded at the end of the page loading with defer attribute. If you have an inline script, you can simply wrap it in an event listener for page loading (window.addEventListener("load", your_function_goes_here)).

If you want document-specific libraries, you have to pass some raw HTML through the parser of the document. For Goldmark, the default Markdown parser starting Hugo v0.60.0, blocks raw HTML by default and you can disable it by setting markup.goldmark.renderer.unsafe to true.

For Blackfriday, it parses even the raw HTML just fine. Though, you have to set it as the default Markdown parser.

For Asciidoctor, you can use passthroughs to get raw HTML through.