Tofu improves readability of screen text

Amar Sagoo today announced the release of Tofu, an a application for improving readability of text on the screen by reflowing it into columns: "Tofu addresses the common problem that people don't like reading text on computer screens. It avoids two problems that degrade readability of text. One is that windows are typically very wide, which makes moving from the end of one line to the beginning of the next difficult for the eye. The other is that the custom of vertically scrolling through text has the effect of getting lost amongst the large number of moving lines."

Tofu attempts to improve the reading speed by showing text in narrow columns, a well-known typographical technique applied in newspapers. Furthermore, it makes the text appear more stable by completely eliminating vertical scrolling. The user instead moves from column to column horizontally. This also has the effect that the text is now broken into more manageable chunks, like the pages of a novel. The freeware runs on Mac OS X 10.1 or later.



The company plans to release a component for Apple's Cocoa development framework that software developers can use to employ Tofu's text display technique in their own applications.

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Other story tags: Other Applications