Font Size Too Small

Firefox + Theme Font & Size Changer + NoSquint which has a global web page zoom setting, (and a cool contrasting persona picture), plus some ToolBar > Customize tweaks, produced this easy to read browser from about 3-4 feet away on my 17" high res anti-glare screen.

(click on the picture to enlarge, or drag and drop on your desktop to open into Preview for a full version)

Instead of suffering with the pain of Safari, at least one can do this and other things to attempt to relieve their suffering. hope it assists. 🙂

As a interesting side note, Steve Jobs was near sighted, meaning he couldn't see far away without his glasses. 😉

I have just had the same problem with the Macbook Air 11 inch and have now flogged it off on ebay after 4 weeks frustration. Fonts too small creating the hassle of putting reading glasses on and off all the time. I tried everything mentioned above including Tinker Tools and all of these are band-aid fixes. High-res screens are for under 40s with 20/20 vision. Perhaps there should be better warning of this from Apple.

Coming from the Windows world I've recently bought a new Mac Mini. Its extended purpose is to act as a media extension to the living room 46" TV. It seemed a perfect fit considering Apple's reputation as the "graphics and media" company. The more I was surprised for its shortcomings in the very most trivial things in comparison with Windows. The unability to change the fonts and icon sizes used by the system without changing the overall screen resolution is an incredible example.

Icons can easily be resized. Finder > View menu > View Options > adjust icon size slider. In the same window you can adjust the size of the text that accompanies the icons.

You still can't adjust the sizes of menu bar text, dialog boxes, or toolbars or tool palettes in many applications, though.

So, we are now in September 2011 and Lion is here and, yes, there is still no way to increase the system font. I too am very disappointed. I bought a matt screen and then was shocked at the detrimental effect of the hi res. Give us a standard res matt screen!

Anyway, you may say that I should have been aware of what hi res means in practice, and that since I am an old time mac guy I should have known that you can't change the system font size:

eww wrote:

If you've always had Macs, then you're aware that you've never been able to adjust the sizes of the menu and dialog box fonts that are giving you fits now. Perhaps you never wanted to, but if you had, you'd have run into the same inflexibility that you find so annoying — at any time since the Mac was introduced in 1984.

Now, I've been a bit unfair to eww in taking the comment out of context. However, it highlights APPLE'S FAILING. The selling point of Mac OS is that it is intuitive and the user is NOT AWARE. Get it?