---
title: "Reading and appearance"
description: "Font and reading-size presets, plus light and dark themes."
---

# Reading and appearance

Notarium lets you tune **how text looks when you read it**: the font and the size of the reading area, plus a light or dark theme. This is the same rendered Markdown you see in reading mode, in the editor's **Preview**, in the revision history, and in the settings preview — so a single setting applies to all of them at once. Both knobs live in **Settings → Appearance**.

![Reading mode: rendered Markdown — headings, tables and diagrams](/media/app-reader-light.webp)

## Reading font

The font is chosen from a fixed list of presets, grouped by category. The set was picked for popularity, reading quality, and language coverage; **every preset includes Cyrillic**.

| Category | Presets |
|---|---|
| **sans** | System (OS font, default) · Inter · Open Sans · Roboto · Source Sans 3 · Noto Sans |
| **serif** | Georgia (OS font) · Lora · Literata · Merriweather · Source Serif 4 · Noto Serif |
| **mono** | JetBrains Mono · Fira Code · Cascadia Code |

The bundled fonts are **self-hosted** — they live inside the app rather than being pulled from Google's CDN: the app works offline and sends no requests to third-party servers. The browser downloads only the subset of glyphs that actually appears, and only while a font is active; the PWA caches the downloaded files, so once you've used a font it's available offline.

> [!note] Languages beyond Europe
> The app bundles glyph sets for European scripts: Latin, latin-ext, Cyrillic, Greek, Vietnamese — which covers nearly every European language. For CJK, Arabic, Hebrew, and Indic scripts the font falls back to the system (the GitHub/Notion/Obsidian pattern) — a note like this still renders correctly, with no extra download.

## Reading size

The size is a stepped preset — **S / M / L / XL** (roughly 15.5 / 17 / 19 / 21px; M by default). You set it once, and the entire typographic scale — headings, code, lists, tables, quotes — is expressed relative to it, so a single step scales the whole rhythm proportionally rather than just the paragraphs.

The size applies identically in both [editor](/docs/guides/editor/) modes. WYSIWYM inherits both the font and the reading size; **Source** inherits the size but keeps a monospace font — it's code. Inline code and code blocks stay monospace regardless of the reading font you pick.

## Theme

You switch between light and dark themes in settings; the choice is remembered in the browser. The chrome of the installed app adapts to the theme — the color of the system bar matches the page background instead of flashing a mismatched color (see [Install as an app](/docs/guides/pwa/)).

Reading mode safely renders **GitHub-flavored Markdown**. Wiki-links `[[note]]` and `[[note|label]]` are clickable.