You can customize various aspects of your Curvenote site including:
actions
- in the top right of the default template, these are visible throughout your site.nav
- links in the navigation top bar that are visible throughout your site.logo
- the logo and logoText, see Logo & branding for more.toc
- the table of contents that is the list of all documents in your site, see Table of Contents for more.

Figure: 1Parts of a Curvenote site that you can customize using the default template.
Navigation¶
The site.nav
can include any number of links to pages in your site. The title
will be shown in the navigation bar, and the url
is where you will navigate when you click! Please make sure this matches a URL that is accessible on your site.
version: 1
site:
nav:
- title: My PhD Thesis
url: /phd
- title: Nested Menu
children:
- title: My Menu Item
url: /a-link
The nav
is a list of these links, and it can also create nested drop-downs by providing a children
list for top level navigations. If children
are provided, the url
field will not be used as the click will open the drop-down.

Figure: 2An example of nested drop-down navigation on the https://transform.softwareunderground.org/ site.
Actions¶
Actions are buttons that appear on the right of the navigation bar. By default, a single “Learn More” action is added to new curvenote sites. You can add, customize and remove actions by editing the actions:
list in the site:
section of the root curvenote.yml
file.
version: 1
site:
actions:
- title: Learn More
url: https://docs.curvenote.com/web
⚒️ To Customize the existing action, simply update the title:
and url:
fields in place
version: 1
site:
actions:
- title: Curvenote on GitHub
url: https://gihub.com/curvenote
⚒️ To add more actions, add additional items to the YAML list, each with their own title:
and url:
fields
version: 1
site:
actions:
- title: GitHub
url: https://gihub.com/curvenote
- title: Sign Up
url: https://curvenote.com/signup
🛠️ To remove all actions, set the field to an empty list actions: []
version: 1
site:
actions: []
Including Static Files¶
You can include static files like PDF documents in the public
folder in the root of your site; these will be deployed with the rest of your site. To include these in the action, put a static: true
, which will ensure the PDF opens in a new tab and the URL is modified correctly. The url
should point to your public folder.
site:
actions:
- title: Download Thesis
url: public/my_thesis.pdf
static: true
For auto-generated PDF files from your content, you can build these with Curvenote.