Reading Experience
Current's reader is designed for extended reading sessions with careful attention to typography, spacing, and visual rhythm.
Typography First
The reader uses a carefully selected serif font for body text, optimized for readability:
- Line length: Capped at ~66 characters for optimal reading
- Line height: Generous spacing (1.625) for easy eye-tracking
- Paragraph spacing: Clear separation without excessive white space
- Font size: Customizable to your preference
Reader Features
Clean Content Extraction
Current uses Readability to extract the article content, stripping away navigation, ads, and clutter. What you see is the pure content, beautifully formatted.
Scroll Position
Your position is saved automatically, so you can return later and pick up exactly where you left off.
Image Lightbox
Tap any image in an article to view it at full resolution. Pinch to zoom and swipe to dismiss. On Mac, click to open and scroll to zoom.
Original Link
Tap the article title to open the original URL in Safari. Sometimes you need the original layout, comments, or interactive elements.
Reader Themes
The reader uses your chosen theme palette:
- Bright: Clean Apple aesthetic with crisp whites and blue accent
- Paper: Warm, book-like reading experience
- Ocean: Clear and focused with teal accents
- Dusk: Creative and contemplative with lavender
- Ember: Warm terra cotta tones for cozy reading
- Midnight: True black for OLED displays
- Slate: Modern and professional
- Terminal: Green phosphor tones for a developer aesthetic
- Solarized: The classic Solarized palette for all-day readability
See Themes & Palettes for details on each.
Font Scaling
Adjust the reader's font size from 0.8x to 1.4x:
- Go to Settings
- Find Reader Font Scale under Reading
- Drag the slider to adjust (0.8x to 1.4x)
The scale applies to all text proportionally, maintaining the visual hierarchy.
Content-Type Handling
Current adapts its reader for different content types:
Standard Articles
Most articles render with the standard typography-focused layout described above.
Webcomics
Image-heavy content like webcomics displays in a special mode optimized for viewing comics, with large images that you can scroll and zoom.
Reader Actions
Navigation
- Swipe back or tap back button to return to river
- Scroll to read through the article
- Tap title to open original in Safari
Swipe Actions
Your configured swipe actions work in the reader too. By default, swipe left to mark read (short) or release (long), swipe right to save (short) or share (long). All four slots are configurable in Settings.
Share
Tap the share button to share via the system share sheet. You can share the article link, copy it, or send it to any app.
Save for Later
If you want to save the article for future reading, tap the save button to add it to your Saved list.
Accessibility
The reader supports system accessibility features:
- Dynamic Type: Text scales with your system text size preference
- VoiceOver: Full screen reader support
- Reduce Motion: Minimized animations when enabled
- High Contrast: Respects system contrast settings
Offline Reading
Current prefetches article content so you can read without an internet connection. Saved articles are cached locally with their content and images, ready to read anywhere.
Performance
The reader is optimized for smooth performance:
- Articles load quickly with content extraction happening locally
- Images lazy-load as you scroll
- Progress tracking doesn't impact scrolling performance
- Memory is managed efficiently for long articles