Enlarge your fonts

Enlarge your fonts
Mac Tip #235/22-March-2006

My new MacBook Pro’s screen is about the same physical size as my old PowerBook’s screen, but it packs in more pixels — the individual ‘picture elements’ that make the screen work.

That means that each pixel is a bit smaller than on the older machine (same space, more of them).

So that means that all the text is smaller too. After all, if the text is set to 12 pixels and each pixel is smaller then the text will be smaller.

I’m having trouble reading stuff on this new Mac’s screen, even though it’s gorgeous.

One solution would be to go to the System Preferences, choose Displays and set my screen resolution to a smaller size.

I don’t like that solution though so have opted instead to increase the text size in the applications I use.

The screenshots show my desktop at 1440*900, 1024*768 and 800*600 for comparison. Click on the thumbnails for low quality but full-size images.

There are two ways to increase text size:

1. Zoom. When you zoom text it stays at the same size, but you zoom in on it, like using a magnifying glass or the zoom setting on a camera. This is particularly handy on Microsoft Word, for example, where I’m using a template designed to print text at a specific size for a book I’m writing. To zoom text look for a menu or toolbar item called Zoom. The View menu is a likely candidate here.
2. Increase the font size. When you increase the actual size of the font you’re still viewing it at 100% of its size (unlike zooming) but the font itself is bigger. This is very likely to carry over into bigger fonts if you print the document. To make the fonts bigger look for a menu item called Fonts, Size or Format.