a teleprompter font has one job. stay legible at a glance and at distance. you're reading at arm's length, moving, often a little nervous, and the words are scrolling past. the wrong font costs you flubbed lines.
so the body fonts in open prompter aren't a style menu. they're picked for one thing: how easily you read them in that exact situation.
what's in the picker#
there are six body fonts, and they all lean toward legibility.
- Atkinson Hyperlegible. the default. built by the Braille Institute for low-vision readers, tuned so similar letters don't blur together.
- Lexend. designed with reading specialists to aid reading proficiency. the spacing is the point.
- System Sans. the native iOS face. clean, familiar, no surprises.
- Verdana. drawn for screens at small sizes. wide letters, open spacing.
- New York. a serif, if you read serifs more comfortably or simply prefer the look.
- the brand monospace. fixed-width, for scripts where column alignment matters or you like the feel.
no novelty fonts. no display faces that look great on a poster and fall apart at a glance.
why the defaults are the defaults#
the two defaults aren't there for branding. they earn the slot.
Atkinson Hyperlegible was built to pull apart the letters that trip people up. the lowercase l, the capital I, the number 1. the capital O and the zero. on most fonts those collapse into near-twins, and at distance your eye guesses. guess wrong mid-take and you stumble. Atkinson draws each one differently on purpose, so the guessing stops.
Lexend goes at it from the spacing side. it was designed with reading specialists, with letter and word spacing tuned to help reading flow. the words come at you in cleaner chunks, which matters a lot when they're scrolling and you're talking at the same time.
both can genuinely help if you read with dyslexia or low vision. and here's the part worth saying plainly: they help everyone reading fast at arm's length. that's the whole situation a teleprompter puts you in. a font that's easier for the hardest case is easier for every case.
think about how you read off a prompter. you're not reading word by word. you grab the next few words in a glance, look back at the lens, then grab the next few. every one of those glances is a small bet that you parsed the line right. clearer letterforms and cleaner spacing make those bets safer. that's all a readable font is doing: lowering the odds that a glance lands wrong.
a quick honest note. these faces are designed to support reading, and they can help. they're not a medical treatment and we won't pretend otherwise. if a font reads easier for you, that's the win. that's the only claim here.
picking one#
it's a body-font setting, so try them on your own script. the right pick is the one your eye stops tripping on. for most people that's Atkinson out of the box, and there's no wrong answer if a different face reads cleaner for you.
a face you read well is only half of it. the other half is size and speed.
size and speed do the rest#
the most legible font in the world won't help if it's too small or moving too fast.
font size runs 16 to 160 pt. that range is wide on purpose, because two reads need opposite things. a dense script you're reading off a desk wants smaller text so more of it fits on screen at once and you scroll less. an eye-line read wants the opposite: phone across the room, big words, gaze right by the lens so it reads like eye contact. set the size so a line is comfortable at your actual shooting distance, not at the distance you happen to be holding the phone while you set it up.
scroll speed runs 5 to 200 px/s. a slow setting suits a measured, thoughtful delivery. a fast one keeps a tight, high-energy read from stalling. there's no universal right number, because it tracks your pace, not the script's. read a paragraph out loud, watch whether the line you want sits where your eye is, and nudge it from there.
you can also skip picking a speed entirely. voice tracking scrolls to your pace, so the words move when you say them instead of when a timer says so. pair it with a readable font and a size set for your distance, and the page keeps your place while you talk.
focus mode for the clean read#
once the font, size, and speed feel right, you want them and nothing else on screen. focus mode dims the chrome down to a clean prompter. one eye button brings the controls back when you need them. the words stay, the clutter goes, and your eye has nothing to catch on but the line you're reading.
that's the whole point of the font work too. fewer things to trip on, at a glance, at distance.
open prompter is free and open source. open it, pick a font, set the size for where your phone will actually sit, and read a script out loud. the right font is the one you stop noticing.