Editorial typography

Most apps treat the words people post as a string to render. Lanai treats them as text — the kind that has rhythm, that benefits from a properly placed em dash, that deserves to be set with care.

The body of a post on Lanai is set in a serif designed for reading, sized at the iOS body baseline of 17 points, with line height generous enough that paragraphs feel like paragraphs rather than rows in a table. Author names use a labeled sans-serif. Timestamps and metadata sit in caption type that respects the hierarchy. Numbers — like counts and durations — are tabular, so columns of likes and reposts don’t jitter as you scroll.

A spectrum of careful intervention

When a post arrives, Lanai applies a small amount of typographic care before showing it to you. Curly quotes where someone typed straight ones. An em dash where a sequence of hyphens lives. The kind of trailing-whitespace cleanup that no one notices until it’s not done. None of these change what the post says. They only change how it sits on the page.

For longer posts — the kind that benefit from a magazine-style treatment in the post-as-image export — Lanai goes a step further: hanging punctuation, drop caps where the layout earns one, and proper hyphenation. The author still wrote what they wrote. The page just helped it look its best.

Hyperlegible mode

For readers who find serifs harder to read at certain sizes — or who simply prefer letterforms designed for maximum legibility — a Hyperlegible mode swaps the body and display typefaces for Atkinson Hyperlegible Next, the Braille Institute’s free variable font expressly designed to disambiguate characters that often look alike. It’s a setting, but it isn’t an accommodation: a great many readers turn it on for reasons that have nothing to do with vision and everything to do with comfort.

What you don’t see

You don’t see the architecture. You see paragraphs that have room to breathe, headlines that don’t shout, and text at every size that holds its shape.