Your notes deserve good typography

A book’s designer thinks about the size of the letters, the length of each line and the space between them. Those decisions help you settle into the words.

Soot gives your notes the same care. You shouldn’t have to become a typesetter to make something comfortable to read.

More than choosing a font

A lovely typeface can still be hard to read if the lines stretch across the whole screen or sit too close together.

Soot treats the text as a whole. The typeface, size, line length and spacing work together, whether you’re writing a few things to pick up at the shops or reading something you saved months ago.

A love of the printed word

Soot uses a serif typeface because I love the printed word. Serifs are the small strokes at the ends of the letters, familiar from the pages of many books. Books, and the care that goes into setting them, are a large part of how I want my notes to feel.

The typeface I’ve chosen is Source Serif, designed by Frank Grießhammer at Adobe. It draws on eighteenth-century printing types, with refinements for the sizes we read at today. At smaller sizes, its details become sturdier and its spacing more generous. At larger sizes, it becomes finer and more closely set.

I like that connection: a typeface with its roots in print, made to work on the screen.

A serif is my preference, but it won’t suit everyone. If you find a sans-serif typeface easier to read, you can choose the system font instead.

A comfortable line

With long lines, your eyes have further to travel back to the start of the next one. Very short lines keep interrupting you. Somewhere between the two extremes is a column you can read without thinking much about it.

Across the window

Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. Books, the oldest and the best, stand naturally and rightfully on the shelves of every cottage. They have no cause of their own to plead, but while they enlighten and sustain the reader his common sense will not refuse them.

In a column

The same passage at the same size, from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854).

A screen has more space to use than a printed page, though. A narrow column can be comfortable to read while leaving much of your window empty. Soot’s default line is slightly longer than traditional book typography would suggest, balancing readability with making good use of your screen.

On the Mac, you can choose your text size and line length. Choose a narrower column, or go wider. I wouldn’t recommend the widest settings for sustained reading, but I’m not here to insist that my preference has to be yours. On iPhone and iPad, Soot follows your system text size.

As the text gets larger, the column grows with it, where there’s room, keeping roughly the same number of characters on a line. On a smaller screen or in a narrower window, it fits the space available.

Space to read

The gaps matter too.

Lines need enough space to remain distinct, and paragraphs need enough separation to show where one thought ends and another begins. Headings should be easy to find without overwhelming the text beneath them.

Soot adjusts that spacing with your text size. You can make the words bigger without having to fix everything around them.

A starting point of your own

Soot opens with the typography already chosen. You can start writing straight away.