Reading and display settings
How a transcript looks is worth a minute of setup, because you are going to be staring at it. E-clair lets you change the reading font, its size, the colour theme, and how the word currently playing is marked — and it keeps those choices for next time.
These settings apply to the transcript, not to the whole app. Everything else stays on E-clair’s own serif, so picking a monospace or a sans-serif to read in does not turn the rest of the app into a different product.
Choosing a reading font
Six reading fonts, and the differences matter more at length than they do in a sample. Newsreader is the default.
- Newsreader
- The default. A serif built for reading at length on a screen — the closest thing here to a printed page.
- Lora
- The other serif: a little warmer and rounder, with more contrast in the strokes.
- Inter
- A sans-serif designed for screens. Cleaner at small sizes than either serif, and the one to try if the serifs feel busy.
- Noto Sans
- A sans-serif with unusually broad script coverage. Worth choosing outright if you are learning a language that does not use the Latin alphabet.
- JetBrains Mono
- Monospaced — every character the same width. Some people find the even rhythm easier to track word by word.
- OpenDyslexic
- Weighted at the bottom of each letter to make characters harder to confuse or rotate. Designed for dyslexic readers.
Text size runs from 16 up to 34, in steps of 2, and starts at 22. Changing it re-flows the page you are reading, so a larger size means fewer words per page rather than a longer scroll.
Every one of the proportional fonts falls back to Noto Sans for characters it does not have, so Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Cyrillic, Arabic and Devanagari all render properly whichever font you pick. Only the monospace option is exempt, because falling back would break its even column.
Light and dark
Seven choices: System, three light and three dark. System is the default — it follows your phone and switches over when your phone does, landing on Paper by day and Lamp by night.
- Paper
- The warm off-white E-clair starts on. What System uses by day.
- Vellum
- Warmer and creamier than Paper, closer to aged paper.
- Chalk
- A near-neutral grey with a slight cool cast, for when Paper reads as too warm.
- Lamp
- Warm and candle-lit, with a soft vignette and gentler motion. The most atmospheric of the three, and what System uses at night.
- Slate
- A cool blue-grey dark theme — the practical counterpart to Lamp for late reading.
- Ink
- The darkest option, near-black.
Marking the word that is playing
The word playing right now is marked as you read, and you can choose how. All three do the same job; which one stays out of your way is personal.
- Block
- A filled block behind the word. The default, and the loudest.
- Underline
- A line beneath the word, leaving the text itself untouched.
- Dot
- A small marker — the quietest of the three.
Two small things
One related setting lives on the translation card rather than here: whether its grammar tables open expanded or collapsed. They start collapsed, and E-clair remembers whichever way you leave them.
All of these are stored on the device you set them on. They do not follow your account to another phone, so a new device starts from the defaults again.