Tofu: Eye Friendly Text Reader

Tofu: Eye Friendly Text Reader: “

For most people, reading large amounts of text on a computer screen is unpleasant, while reading books and newspapers is not. Tofu, from developer Amar Sagoo, attempts to address this conundrum.

The idea behind Tofu is that vertically anchored narrow columns are easier to read than strolling through a single wide column of text. The application is basically a text viewer with a twist: Tofu automatically formats text into easy to read columns set against an eye-pleasing off-white backdrop. The application can open plain and rich-text files (.txt and .rtf respectively), or alternatively text can be imported into Tofu simply via copy-paste.

Tofu has a plethora of configuration options in it’s preferences. You can change everything from the default font style and colors, to the line height and margin widths of the window. A nice feature not turned on by default, but worth mentioning, is the ‘Remember stroll position within documents’ feature, which saves the position data into the resource fork of text files, great for multi-session readings of long documents.

Tofu can also work with images. When documents containing images are opened with Tofu, the images are automatically resized and positioned accordingly.

Other nice features of Tofu include a find-as-you-type search feature which immediately begins searching for a word or phrase as you type it, as well as a system-wide services menu tool which allows you to quickly import text into Tofu with a global keyboard shortcut. There’s also a useful, albeit limited, full-screen mode. Tofu could also be improved with support for more file formats – for example Word, Pages, and PDF.

Tofu is free and can be found at the developers website.

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(Via MacApper.)