How to Make Mac Screen Smaller Again

I am "old" <grin> … so I need to employ a magnifying glass to read a lot of the screen words. I suppose that they are in a six or eight-point font. Tin can I make the screen text larger? Say to a 10- or 12-point font?

I know how you feel. My optics aren't all they used to be either.

The expert news is, information technology'due south really easy to brand the fonts bigger, though the setting is oftentimes well hidden.

The bad news is, it'due south also easy to practise the wrong thing and stop upwardly with something that seems ameliorate, just isn't.

• Screen resolution is the wrong thing to modify to make text bigger.
• Windows 10 allows you to change the scaling of what's displayed on screen.
• Older versions of Windows immune yous to command scaling in the form of a DPI, or dots-per-inch, setting.
• CTRL+ and CTRL- piece of work in some apps, like email and spider web browsers, only not all of Windows.

The wrong thing

Changing the screen resolution is the wrong thing to do.

In the past, this was an approach that worked fairly well on CRT-mode monitors. With the ascension of LCD screens, running at anything other than the screen's native resolution can have unintended consequences.

For example, let's say your display is capable of handling a resolution of 1920×1200. That'due south its native resolution, meaning there are physically 1920 dots or pixels beyond, and 1200 dots upwards and down on the screen. It'due south the resolution at which it works all-time.

To make things appear larger, y'all and then change the resolution that Windows uses to 1280×1024. Either of two things volition happen:

• The 1280×1024 image will be stretched by the monitor to fill up the 1920×1200 pixels that make up the brandish. You'll note that that's not an even multiple, so the brandish now has to "stretch" each pixel that Windows gives it beyond 1.v pixels horizontally and i.17 pixels vertically. Because there'southward no such affair as a part of a pixel, the monitor only does its all-time, ofttimes resulting in images that are indeed larger but also significantly fuzzier.
• The 1280×1024 paradigm won't be larger at all; instead, it will exist centered by the monitor using 1280×1024 physical pixels on the screen and surrounded past a black border of unused pixels.

Neither effect is slap-up, and frequently makes the situation worse instead of better.

Fortunately, there is a different approach.

The right thing: scaling

In Windows 10, right-click on your desktop and click Display Settings. In the resulting page of the settings app, yous'll find settings not only for the screen resolution — which we're not going to modify — and something called "scaling".

Windows 10 calibration and layout settings.

(In Windows 7, right-click on your desktop and click Screen Resolution. Click Make text and other items larger or smaller for a roughly equivalent setting: DPI.)

This setting changes the size of everything, including text. For comparison, here are 150% (the default/recommended setting for my display) and 250% side past side (click the image for the larger or full-sized version).

Scaling example in Windows 10.

When yous make this setting change, yous may need to log out and and so log back in to Windows earlier it is fully applied.

Advanced settings

If the scaling options aren't plenty, or the results wait wrong, click on Advanced scaling settings (direct underneath the scaling drop-down). In that location are two settings to experiment with.

Advanced scaling settings in Windows 10.

"Permit Windows effort to fix apps then they're not blurry" does exactly that. If you're experiencing blurry text, I know of no downside to turning this on.

"Custom scaling" lets y'all enter a scaling factor that may not have been otherwise available in the recommended dropdown.

Every bit you can see, it's the same custom dialog used in Windows 7.

Caveats

This concept of scaling what's displayed on the screen has been a component of Windows for a long time. Applications aren't supposed to ignore the setting, and near practice not. About play past the rules.

Most.

Unfortunately, you may run across an application where the scaling setting is used inconsistently or has no event. Arraign the awarding; it's not playing by the rules.

And finally, if you make things likewise big, you may go a warning from Windows that the setting may make some things inaccessible. A great instance is if things are scaled then large that a dialog box is too big to fit, then its OK and Abolish buttons aren't visible. That's something you'll simply demand to compensate for ane style or some other — either by going back and reducing the scaling, or by determining if at that place's another way to accomplish what y'all're attempting to do without having things appear off-screen.

Update: CTRL+ and CTRL-

Many, many people accept commented that they employ the CTRL primal and + or – to brand text larger or smaller, respectively (or use CTRL plus the mouse wheel).

This is a very constructive approachwhen it works.

CTRL+ and CTRL- are non a part of Windows. They are a convention that some applications — virtually notably web browsers — choose to implement.

But they will not touch on the size of text in other applications, or in  Windows itself. The techniques outlined in a higher place are about making everything — regardless of what program yous are running — larger (or smaller).

That being said, CTRL+ and CTRL-, (and CTRL with the mouse cycle) are very convenient as long as all you intendance well-nigh is the webpage or email you're viewing.

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Source: https://askleo.com/how_can_i_make_the_text_on_my_screen_larger/

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