Tofu For Mac

Depending on what device you're using, text can be quite difficult to follow if arranged in a single, wide block. When your eyes move from one line to the next, it’s often disorienting, thus slowing your progress.

Tofu aims to mimic a layout you commonly see in newspapers, where text is arranged into multiple narrow columns. To make it easier to follow text while scrolling, it uses a horizontal column layout and horizontal scrolling.

The app is lightweight and very simple to use. If you have a document, in any common format, you can just drop it in the main window or on the Dock icon. You can have multiple windows open at the same time, and therefore multiple documents.

You don’t need an actual file, though. Say you’ve found an interesting article on Wikipedia, but the web layout isn’t ideal. You can just copy the text, paste it in the Tofu window, and read it there directly.

If you haven’t tried an app like this before, you might not think it will make much of a difference. However, I found it could read much faster, and the narrow columns are especially well suited for quickly scanning a document to get a general idea of what it’s about.

There’s a good reason many books and newspapers use this layout, as it makes it easier to get through a text without losing focus.

The default settings are great, but you can also tweak them to your liking. You can change the font, text size, line height, background, and text color, along with the column width and margins.

Mouse wheel and trackpad scrolling is the simplest way to navigate, but you can also use the arrow keys. To find something, you can just start typing and use Cmd+G to go through all occurrences of the word.

Tofu is pretty much perfect for what it does. It’s lightweight, simple to use, and completely free. It can help you out a lot if you’re struggling to read difficult documents, and you can customize it as needed.