The best font settings for small e-ink screens: size, spacing and fonts that read well

A 4–4.5-inch screen has about half the area of a 6-inch Kindle, so the settings you'd use on a big reader leave very few words on each page. Every choice, from font size to margins, trades comfort against how often you turn the page.

E-ink adds its own quirks: it draws edges with a limited number of grey shades, so fine hairlines and light font weights can look faint or broken, especially on lower-PPI screens.

Start one or two steps smaller than you'd use on a phone, and adjust from there. Dropping from 10 to 8 point fits about 56% more text on a page.

How small you can comfortably go depends on the screen's sharpness. Pixels available for each em of 8-point type:

More on why this matters in 300 PPI e-readers explained.

• Line spacing: around 1.2–1.4 times the font size. Tighter fits more lines; looser is easier to track on long reading sessions.
• Margins: keep them narrow on a pocket screen. The bezel already frames the page, and every millimetre of margin costs words.
• Justified text with hyphenation: justification gives clean edges, and hyphenation stops narrow lines filling with big gaps. If your reader can't hyphenate, use left-aligned text instead.
• Paragraph style: indented paragraphs with no extra space between them fit more text than block paragraphs.

Good e-ink fonts have a large x-height (tall lower-case letters), sturdy strokes and open shapes, so letters stay distinct at small sizes. These free, open-licensed fonts are popular with e-reader owners:

Avoid light or thin weights, condensed fonts and very high-contrast display faces: they're the first to break up on e-ink. If a font looks faint, try its bold weight or a font-weight setting, if your reader has one.

• IKAWE Moov: supports TTF, OTF and TTC fonts. Import them in the IKAWE app and select Sync on Moov, or copy them into the Font folder in USB Mode; then choose Font on the reading screen. Step by step: add custom fonts to Moov.
• Xteink readers with CrossPoint: CrossPoint supports custom fonts installed on the microSD card; recent versions added TTF support. See the CrossPoint project for the current instructions.
• Kobo and Kindle: both let you add your own fonts by copying them into a fonts folder on the reader.
• Only install fonts whose licence allows it. The fonts above are all free to use.