Reading screen settings: fonts, layout, night mode
Tune Yomite's reading display to your eyes: vertical or horizontal layout, five Japanese fonts, spacing, margins and an amber night tint.
To make the reading screen easier on your eyes, open the display settings icon in the reader. From there you can switch between vertical and horizontal text, choose a font (five Japanese faces, including mincho and gothic), adjust kerning, line spacing and margins, and set the Warm at night (amber) tint, all in the free tier. Your choices are remembered the next time you open the reader.
Related use case: Accessibility
Yomite reads aloud, but it isn’t built only for closed-eyes listening. Its reader is designed for a “listen while you watch” mode too — with furigana readings and karaoke-style highlighting on screen — and the display itself can be tuned in detail: vertical or horizontal layout, font, kerning, line spacing, margins, and an amber night mode. Here’s what each setting does.
Can I read in vertical text?
Yomite’s reader supports both vertical (tategaki) and horizontal (yokogaki) layouts. Classic Aozora Bunko literature and older novels in literary Japanese tend to feel more natural in vertical layout, while web articles and technical text usually read more comfortably horizontally. Switching between the two, depending on what you’ve imported, is a small change that makes a real difference once you try it.
Can I change the font?
A readable font is a personal thing. Yomite ships with five Japanese fonts, from crisp mincho-style faces to gothic and rounder, softer letterforms — so you can pick whichever is easiest on your eyes. If you tend to watch the screen while listening for extended stretches, this choice directly affects how tired your eyes get.
Can I adjust spacing and margins?
Beyond the font itself, you can adjust kerning, line spacing, and margins. Widen the line spacing if text feels cramped, or tighten the margins if you want more text visible per screen. If you’re using karaoke highlighting — where the sentence currently being read is highlighted on screen — a bit of extra line spacing makes it easier to track which line is playing.
Is there a setting for reading in the dark?
Yomite includes a Warm at night setting that tints the screen amber; a slider sets how strong the tint is. A bright white background is harsh in a dark room; amber tones soften that. It’s meant for the moments when you want to glance at the screen occasionally while listening right before sleep.
Does it work with furigana and highlighting?
These display settings are designed to work together with furigana readings and karaoke highlighting. Furigana appears as small readings above kanji, and karaoke highlighting tracks the currently-read sentence in real time. If you run into a kanji you don’t recognize, glancing at the screen alongside listening is the fastest way to confirm it. For more on that pairing, see the furigana and karaoke highlighting guide.
Does this help with tired eyes?
For anyone prone to visual fatigue, being able to tune the display instead of living with fixed text size and colors makes a real difference over long sessions. An app that lets you adjust font, spacing, and color scheme feels very different to use for an hour than one that doesn’t. If visual fatigue or dyslexia is part of why you’re reading by ear, see the Reading by Ear accessibility guide for more.
Where are these settings?
Open the reader screen and tap the display settings icon to reach the vertical/horizontal toggle, font picker, kerning/line spacing/margin settings, and the Warm at night slider. You can change any of these mid-book, and your choices are remembered the next time you open the reader.
Are the display settings free?
Everything covered here — the vertical reader, furigana, and karaoke highlighting — is available in Yomite’s free tier. Yomite offers every on-device voice (315+ Japanese voices), on-device AI narration that also plays offline, and the reader features for free, with up to 20 minutes of listening a day. No daily limit and iCloud sync unlock with Premium (monthly, yearly, or lifetime), but the display customization itself isn’t gated behind that purchase.
Wrapping up
Yomite isn’t only a listening app — its reader is built for the moments you want to watch as well as listen. Combine vertical/horizontal layout, your choice of font, kerning/line-spacing/margin adjustments, and the warm night tint, and you can shape a reading screen that’s easy on your particular eyes. Speech synthesis still runs entirely on-device, so none of the text you bring in leaves your phone.
— Yomite Team
Related: Hands-free listening with Siri and the lock screen