Safari Reader View: Fonts, Themes, and Text Sizes

Safari’s Reader View strips away webpage clutter, advertisements, and navigation bars to provide a clean, distraction-free reading experience. This article covers the exact customization options built into Safari's Reader View across macOS, iOS, and iPadOS, specifically detailing the available font families, background color themes, and text size adjustments you can use to tailor articles to your visual preferences.

Font Families

Safari provides nine built-in typefaces in Reader View, offering a mix of traditional serif and modern sans-serif options to improve readability:

  • Athelas: A clean, literary serif font designed specifically for long-form reading.
  • Charter: A crisp serif typeface originally designed for low-resolution displays that scales sharply on modern screens.
  • Georgia: A widely used serif font known for its generous spacing and clear legibility at smaller sizes.
  • Iowan: A classic, warm serif font (Iowan Old Style) with wide proportions.
  • New York: Apple’s custom-designed serif typeface that blends historical typographic styles with modern screen optimization.
  • Palatino: A wide, elegant old-style serif typeface that offers heavy, easy-to-read strokes.
  • San Francisco: Apple’s default system sans-serif font, providing a clean, uniform, and modern appearance.
  • Seravek: A humanist sans-serif typeface with subtle curves, designed for near-effortless reading.
  • Times New Roman: The traditional, compact serif standard commonly used in print and digital media.

Background Color Themes

To help reduce eye strain under varying lighting conditions, Reader View includes four distinct background and text color combinations:

  • White: Black text on a bright white background. This is the default theme and works best in well-lit environments or direct sunlight.
  • Sepia: Dark brown text on a warm, beige background. This theme mimics the look of physical paper and reduces blue light exposure.
  • Gray: Light gray text on a dark slate-gray background. This offers a softer dark mode alternative with lower contrast than pure black.
  • Black: Crisp white text on a true black background. This theme is ideal for reading in pitch-dark environments and saves battery life on OLED screens.

Text Sizes

Rather than using traditional numbered point sizes, Safari Reader View adjusts text size using incremental step controls located in the appearance menu (the aA orReader icon in the address bar).

  • Decrease Text Size (Small "A" button): Shrinks the text, allowing more words and paragraphs to fit on the screen at once.
  • Increase Text Size (Large "A" button): Enlarges the text for easier reading from a distance or for users with visual impairments.

There are 12 discrete text size levels available in Reader View. The text dynamically reflows at every step, ensuring that sentences never run off the edge of the screen, regardless of how large you make the font. On macOS, you can also cycle through these text sizes using the keyboard shortcuts Command (+) to increase and Command (-) to decrease while Reader View is active.