A note on how this was made.
A colophon is the small printer's note at the back of a well‑made book — telling you what it was set in, what paper it was printed on, and the names of the people who made it. This is ours.
Bibliographic record
1.4.0 · March 2026 · with corrections to 1.4.0a.lex v1 and .lexis v3.~/Lexis/Library by default; portable between machines via .lexis backup.The typefaces
Three typefaces do all the work, on the website and inside the reader. The typography is the design — there is almost nothing else.
A book is a place, not a feed.
Lora carries every paragraph you read in Lexis, and most of the titling here. Its italic does the talking when the roman would shout.Cyreal, 2011 · Open Font Licence · cyreal.org
Open. Library. Read. Marginalia.
Plex Sans handles every button, toolbar, sidebar label, and form field — the parts of the interface that should disappear into the reading.Bold Monday for IBM, 2017 · Open Font Licence · ibm.com/plex
⌘K v1.4.0 / 432 pp
Plex Mono carries page numbers, keyboard shortcuts, citations, file hashes, and the small marginal labels that mark one kind of thing apart from another.Bold Monday for IBM, 2017 · Open Font Licence
The palette
Five colours, used sparingly. Three papers, three inks, and three accents — gold for ourselves, teal for evidence and good news, rose for questions and warnings. The dark mode is the same palette, inverted: black ink on the back of a book.
With thanks to
No single‑file reader is really made by one person. Lexis stands on a small library of generous open work; we'd like to name the most important of it here.
Mozilla's PDF renderer — what lets Lexis open a PDF in‑browser. It is, by some distance, one of the kindest pieces of open software in existence.
Fred Chasen's library for parsing and rendering EPUB 2/3. The reflowable layout and chapter navigation are its work.
Stuart Knightley's pure‑JS zip implementation — handles every .lex bundle and every .lexis backup that ships in and out of Lexis.
Mike Williamson's converter for Word documents. The reason your old DOCX manuscripts open cleanly.
Christopher Jeffrey's fast Markdown parser — what renders your notes and any .md you drop on the window.
James Hall's PDF generation library, used for the printable reading‑progress and highlights‑&‑depth reports.
Seventy thousand classics that fill the bookshelf the first time you open Lexis. The shelf would be lonely without them.
Two open scholarly catalogues that make the Research panel possible. Two and a half million papers, asked for politely.
A note on the language
The website is set in British English ("colour", "centre", "behaviour"), with American spellings allowed wherever a contributor used them — we don't correct other people's prose. Quotation marks are "curly" and dashes are — the long ones. Initial drop‑caps are set in italic, as in the older Penguin Classics; verse epigraphs are right‑aligned with a thin rule.
About this website
The marketing pages are set in the same three typefaces as the reader. The home page uses a small React fragment for the Tweaks panel and the FAQ; everything else is plain HTML and hand‑set CSS. There is no analytics, no cookies, no third‑party scripts beyond fonts. Open the developer tools and check — nothing is sent anywhere.
If you'd like to ask anything about how a particular page was made, or borrow a small piece for your own, write to hi@lexisreader.com. We are slow but we say yes more often than no.
Made slowly, in Melbourne, and by members from all over the globe.
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