Font Sizes

Font Sizes
Mac Tip #192/20-April-2005

I visit quite a lot of web pages and sometimes the text is just way too small to read. This is partly failing eyesight, but it’s also sometimes that the web designer made some poor choices when they set up the page.

If you still use the aging Microsoft Internet Explorer web browser visit the View menu and choose Text Zoom to make the text larger or smaller).

Apple’s Safari web browser allows you to use the Make Text Bigger (or Smaller) items from the View menu, but you can do something even better.

The screenshots show you a web page with several sizes of text, from a ridiculously small 6 pixels to a somewhat large 16 pixels. I find these days I can’t comfortably read text below about 12 pixels.

Visit Safari’s Preferences from under the Safari menu, or press Command , (Apple comma) and click on the Advanced tab. Now you can check a box called Universal Access: never use font sizes smaller than, and choose a size. I’ve chosen 12 pixels.

The third screenshot shows you the effect: now those too-small lines of text are all at least 12 pixels and readable.

What a relief!

Experiment a bit with the minimum size you prefer; you should find it makes web pages just that bit easier to read.

Note: I think all versions of Safari have this option, but I haven’t checked it with older versions. I’m using Safari 1.3 (v312).