Larger fonts in Menu bar and title bars?

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Level 1

15 points

Larger fonts in Menu bar and title bars?

I recently purchased an Intel Mac Mini for my mother. She does not have the greatest eyesight and I would like to increase the size of the font used in the menu bar, window title bar, etc.. In Windows there is a "large font" theme that does this very nicely.

Is this possible?

The only thing I found that might help is the "Zoom" mode and thats not going to work. She has enough trouble using the mouse as it is and this will only be more difficult...

Thanks,
Jeff

Posted on Oct 15, 2006 4:45 PM

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Answer 1

Oct 15, 2006 4:50 PM in response to Jeff Webber

Hi Jeff,

Welcome to Apple Discussions!

You can use Universal Access, it's in Control panels to 'display fonts no smaller than' a specific size, this is probably what you're looking for

regards,

Peter.

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Answer 2

Jeff Webber Author

Level 1

15 points

Oct 15, 2006 5:08 PM in response to Peter Miller

Hi Jeff,

Welcome to Apple Discussions!

You can use Universal Access, it's in Control panels
to 'display fonts no smaller than' a specific size,
this is probably what you're looking for

regards,

Peter.

Hmmm, I do not see any such option in the Universal Access panel in system preferences. Where exactly is this capability?

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Answer 3

Oct 15, 2006 5:15 PM in response to Jeff Webber

bottom right or center???

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Answer 4

Jeff Webber Author

Level 1

15 points

Oct 15, 2006 5:35 PM in response to Peter Miller

Hi Jeff,

Welcome to Apple Discussions!

You can use Universal Access, it's in Control panels
to 'display fonts no smaller than' a specific size,
this is probably what you're looking for

regards,

Peter.

OK, Let us try this again.

If I bring up "System Preferences" and then click on the "Universal Access" doohickey I get a control panel applet that has 4 tabs. The first tab labeled "Seeing" does not contain any option to set a minimum font size. It only contains the "VoiceOver", "Zoom", and "Display" options. None of these options allow me to set the minimum font size. The other tabs in the universal access applet are "Hearing", "Keyboard", "Mouse and Trackball" -- none of these contain anything to do with setting font size.

Perhaps you can provide more detailed instructions to find this mysterious font size setting?

I just searched again in this forum and found this recent discussion which seems to say it is not possible to somehow enable larger fonts in the menu bar and title bar and such. This is ridiculous. Since you can now get LCD displays that have very high pixel density the physical size of these fonts is quite small. Changing the display resolution is not a valid solution since everything gets blurry when you use an LCD at non-native resolution.

Here is URL to recent discussion.

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=3308141

Please tell me that it is possible to increase the size of the font in the menu bar... If I cannot do this I have spent $700 on a computer my mother cannot use.

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Answer 5

Jeff Webber Author

Level 1

15 points

Oct 16, 2006 2:55 PM in response to Jeff Webber

OK, I'm asking again as I have not gotten an answer that works.....

Is there any way to make the menu bar fonts larger?

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Answer 6

Jan 1, 2007 12:46 PM in response to Jeff Webber

I am having a similar problem. 72dpi is a pointless default for most modern displays and harks back to MacOs 1 when the dpi of the average display was 72.

I'd say your best option would be to use BootCamp to install Windows XP as this lets you set the dots-per-inch setting of the screen to something more reasonable.

Otherwise, you're dead right. You've just spent $700 on a machine your mother can't use!

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