How do I adjust the font size in OS X Leopard dialog boxes?
Back in 2005, I bought my mother a 17" iMac G5 2.0 GHz, which originally cam with OS X 10.3 (Tiger?). Over the course of the years, partially in an effort to be able to provide "in-house" tech-support for her, I have kept at least one Mac system myself. However, also over the course of the years, my Macs have been replaced with the newer, Intel-based, offerings--currently have two MacBook Pros from late 2010... I've also recently upgraded to Lion.
So here's where it gets tricky...
My mother is currently enrolled in Microsoft Office courses as part of a medical curriculum at a local community college and, while the courses are tailored to Office 2010 for Windows, she also has the latest version of Office:Mac because she prefers to use her Mac ; ) In fact, she pretty much only uses her PC Laptop for school work, everything else is done with the Mac.
Imagine her surprise when, no doubt due to some half-remembered/ill-conceived button-pressing, she ends up with gigantic fonts in her system dialog boxes! (see image). At first, I thought it was a simple matter of disabling some accidentally activated handicap/accessibility feature, but after playing with these features on my own machine--Lion has the same layout, apparently--I was unable to recreate the conditions depicted in the attached image. I did quite a bit of research online to see about adjusting font sizes and such, but with an eye towards doing this with shortcut key-sequences or obscure menu selections as it's not likely at all that mom was engaged in any command-line hijinks : | All I found in my travels was advice on how to set font sizes in individual program, shortcut key-sequences concerning increasing/decreasing font sizes in Mail, Safari, etc., and a BUNCH of references to a utility called TinkerTool, which I eventually downloaded, installed and played with as a longshot--mom certainly doesn't have anything like this on her syste... she's INSANELY paranoid about downloading ANYTHING off of the Internet... perhaps overly so at time ; |
Regardless, none of the answers.advice I found online dealt with her problem in particular. As you can see, the font sizes only seem to be affected in the dialog boxes--they're HUGE! I'm no slouch when it comes to using OS X, and I'm no stranger to Unix/Linux and certainly know that almost each and every pixel in the OS(s) are controllable through some configuration file or mind-numblingly involved command (from the CLI), but I have to pretend that I don't know anything about those things because it doesn't make sense that a 62 year-old woman who's just now learning MS Office at a local community college has any idea that these things are even possible, let alone stumble onto whatever arcane series of arguments would tell a command given in a terminal window would result in these sort of type-setting shenannigans : |
As I said, mom has a 17" iMac G5 2.0 GHz (ca. early 2005) w/ 160 GB SATA HDD, 1 GB RAM, running OS X 10.5.8 (Leopard). Can you guys help me to help her?
iMac, Mac OS X (10.5.8), 17" iMac G5 2.0 GHz ca. 2005
