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About this tool
Warm menu-ready font pairs with leader-dot price alignment and a minimum print size for dim dining rooms.
Food And Cafe Font Pairing matches warm display faces with readable body fonts for menus, boards and packaging, and calculates the two print numbers that decide whether a menu works in the room. Minimum body size comes from the legibility convention that character height should be at least 1/200 of the reading distance, scaled up for dim lighting: at 400 mm in a candlelit dining room that lands near 10 pt. Leader-dot counts come from the column width minus the dish name, the price and a 2 mm gap either side.
Open Food And Cafe Font Pairing on AltFTool — it loads instantly in your browser.
Choose a Font pair — Playfair Display + Karla, Lora + Source Sans 3, Cormorant + Jost, Bitter + Open Sans, Amatic SC + Nunito Sans or Frank Ruhl Libre + Assistant.
Set Lighting (Bright daylight cafe, Normal interior lighting, Dim restaurant / candlelight or Very dim bar), 'Reading distance (mm)', 'Menu column width (mm)', 'Body size (pt)', 'Longest dish name (characters)' and 'Price (characters)'.
Read the Minimum body size in pt and px with the required cap height in mm, characters per line and 'Leader dots between name and price', then press 'Copy CSS' or 'Copy URL' for the Google Fonts request.
Minimum type size accounts for both reading distance and how dim the space is.
Warns when the dish name and price already fill the column before any dots are placed.
Outputs points for the printer and pixels for the website version of the same menu.
Around 10 to 11 pt for body text read at arm's length in normal restaurant lighting, rising toward 11 to 12 pt in a very dim room. Below about 9 pt guests start holding the menu at an angle to catch the light.
Pair a display serif for course headings with a compact, high-legibility body face: Playfair Display with Karla, Lora with Source Sans 3, or Bitter with Open Sans. Reserve informal faces such as Amatic SC for boards and never set prices in them.
Either right-align the prices in a fixed column with tabular figures, or run a dotted leader between the dish and the price. For a leader, leave at least 2 mm of clear space on each side so the dots do not touch the text.
Only for short course headings. All caps removes the word-shape cue that helps scanning, so a paragraph-length dish description set in caps is measurably slower to read. If you use caps, add roughly 0.05em of letter-spacing.