After many years of using computers for everything - from writing text to 3D modeling and rendering - there are usually few programs that can genuinely get you all giddy and excited. Equally there are very few programs that are so insanely great that they make you want to use them, and open up your interest in an area that you had never considered before or that you had given up on. Tofu is such a program.

What it does

Tofu’s core functionality can be considered as being very simple, if not simplistic: it is a viewer application that can display text documents of all kinds as well as PDF documents and saved web pages. That doesn’t sound like much to write home about; however, the way this application does its job is simply brilliant.

Reading the traditional way

In essence, the job Tofu does can be done by Preview - after all, they are both viewer applications, and Preview can even show a lot more file types. However, the big difference between them is how they do that viewing. Preview is like all other applications that came before it: it shows you the document, one page at a time, or continuously, and you scroll down to keep reading. Standard stuff, really, but it has limitations.

Most of the time, when reading small chunks of text, we prefer relatively normal sizes of text, that make it take up a moderate amount of space on the screen. However, when reading a whole book on the computer, we often have to make the fonts much larger, simply because the lines are huge at the normal size, and they are difficult to read. This is why newspapers have been using columns, as they make the lines shorter and easier to read. Reading on a computer with normal font sizes is like trying to read a paper where the lines extend across the whole width of the page.

Another issue when reading large blocks of text on a computer is the scrolling. Scrolling down one page usually makes you loose track of where you were if the text is continuous. If you choose to view the text as pages, there is very little actual text per page because you need to make the text bigger to avoid those unnaturally long lines; and as a result, the reading feels very fragmented. The only other real choice is manual scrolling, which can often make you miss the line you were on because the text extends down a long way.

Reading the Tofu way

Tofu throws away the traditional approach of displaying text and goes for one that is perfectly suited for reading large amounts of text.

First of all, it breaks all the text up into columns that make it so much easier to read, especially at normal font sizes. Then, instead of having one single column that is actually the window, the window will display the text with a more horizontal approach in several columns.
The second thing it does is to take out the vertical dimension entirely. There is no scrolling down in Tofu, all the text is presented in a horizontally orientated manner. This means that the text scrolls from right to left, and when you scroll the text, it moves one column at a time. This is absolutely perfect because it allows you to move forward very precisely, while not breaking up the reading experience because you can still see the columns that came before.

These may seem like minor changes, but the difference in the actual experience of reading on a computer is earth shattering. The program’s Read Me, takes three full screen scrolls to go through top to bottom in TextEdit, and is hard to read because of the long lines and jagged edge. In Tofu on the other hand, the same document is a one and a half screen scroll from start to finish and feels like about half the same text. It is much more spaced out and less straining on the eyes. And the same goes for full blown books.

The Good

Perfectly suited for reading large amounts of text and even entire books.

The Bad

The only bad thing about it is that it requires Tiger, meaning that a lot of people might not be able to use this great piece of software.

The Truth

This is a superb application that makes reading on a computer as easy and enjoyable as reading from a book. It is a "must have" for anyone that has to read large amounts of text.

Here are some screenshots, click to enlarge: