Appearance

Can I customize the appearance of Reader?

You can customize the text formatting on both web and mobile. Click the Aa icon on web, or tap into the ... menu and select Appearance on mobile, to access a variety of settings:

• Typeface: Select from a variety of serif and sans serif typefaces, including Atkinson Hyperlegible and OpenDyslexic.
• Font size: The default is 20px, but this is adjustable down to 14px and up to 80px. (Shift + - to decrease, Shift + = to increase.)
• Line spacing: Change this to adjust the amount of blank space between each line of text. Defaults to 1.4. (Shift + : to decrease, Shift + " to increase.)
• Line width: Adjusts the maximum width of the document content. Defaults to medium. (Web only. Shift + , to decrease, Shift + . to increase.)

Does Reader have dark mode?

Reader has both light mode and dark mode, as well as an "auto" setting to detect the color mode of the operating system. You can change the mode at any time from the Appearance menu, or you can use the keyboard shortcut Cmd/Ctrl + Option + T.

How can I enable pagination for reading ebooks and other long-form documents?

You can toggle this feature on or off from the Appearance panel by tapping into the ... menu in the bottom right corner and selecting Appearance.

From there, you can select Paged scroll to turn on pagination.

To change the default behavior of this feature, you can tap into the More settings & page defaults menu and toggle "Paged scrolling by default" on or off for each document type.

By default, EPUBs will have this option turned on, but you can adjust to suit your own preferences and the settings will be saved for any document you open on the same device.

Why is it called "paged scroll"? Why can't I swipe sideways to turn pages?

Although sideways swiping is the standard gesture for a lot of other reading apps, we couldn't implement pagination that way without reworking the entire UX of our mobile reading experience because those gestures are already reserved to open the Info panel and the table of contents. Additionally, the sideways swiping paradigm makes for an extraordinarily clunky highlighting experience, and we value highlighting too much to cripple it with pagination.

Ultimately, "paged scroll" turned out to be the innovation that solved both of those issues. By keeping the content vertical, pagination can be briefly disabled to allow for a smooth experience highlighting across pages. It also means that the swiping gestures don't interfere with the pre-existing sidebars. Plus, we were still able to implement tap zones to trigger a page turn, which ends up feeling very similar to a standard pagination experience.