Appearance → Customize → Typography → Body font. Face, size (three boxes), and line height.
This is the one to get right. It is the type your readers look at for minutes at a stretch; everything else on the page is glanced at.
Face
Default System default (fastest) — the visitor’s own UI font, which is why a fresh Stoat site renders its text before anything has downloaded.
The nine built-in stacks are all web-safe, so choosing Georgia costs nothing either. Georgia is the serif worth trying first: it was drawn for screens, it is on effectively every device, and it reads as a publication rather than an interface.
For anything else, install a family under Appearance → Fonts.
Size
Three boxes: desktop, tablet (≤767px), phone (≤479px). The theme’s value is 16px. Any CSS length works — 16px, 1.05rem, 17px.
| 16px | the browser default. Fine, and what most sites use |
| 17–18px | the usual choice for a site whose job is reading |
| 19–20px | a long-form essay site; needs a wider narrow width to keep the line length sane |
Leave the tablet and phone boxes empty unless you have a reason. Phones are held closer than laptops, so the desktop size is usually right there too; the case for a smaller phone size is a large desktop size, where 20px on a 375px screen gives you six words a line.
Size and line length are one decision. Raising the body size without widening the narrow width shortens every line, and past a point the column stops being readable. The table on that page pairs them.
Line height
Default 1.5 — unitless, meaning 1.5 × the font size, which is how line height should be set so it scales with the type.
| 1.4 | tight; suits a large face or a narrow column |
| 1.5 | the theme’s value |
| 1.6–1.75 | airier; suits a serif face or a long article |
Above about 1.8 the lines stop reading as a paragraph and start reading as a list.
What it covers
Everything that is not a heading, a menu or the site title: post and page content, excerpts, comments, widgets, form fields, the footer.
The meta row and other small print are sized relative to this, so raising the body size raises them proportionally.