Maria’s Guides

Don’t make the font size larger — zoom it!

Yesterday, I reread a blog entry I wrote earlier this year about my failing eyesight (”The Eyes Had It“). My far vision has always been bad, but now I’m beginning to lose my close vision, too. Miraz, my co-author on the WordPress book, commented that she’s going through the same thing and now uses a larger font size when working with Word.

As a writer, I spend a good portion of my workday in front of word processing or page layout software. I have a 21″ Sony monitor at my office — you know, one of those enormous super VGA CRTs that weighs about 80 lbs. I have the screen resolution set so I see a lot on my screen. But that means that most of what I see is small.

I found that if I received a document from someone with a normal font size — say 12 points — I just wasn’t able to view it comfortably at 100% magnification. So I needed a workaround.

There were two options:

• Change the screen resolution to a lower setting. On a Mac, you do this with the Displays preferences pane. On Windows, I think it’s also called Displays and its a control panel. I’m not sure what that big monitor at the office is set to, but my 12″ PowerBook is set all the way up to 1024 x 786. If I dropped that down to 800 x 600, everything on screen would look larger and I’d probably have a better time seeing it. But I’d also get less on my screen. And some Web sites — like Flying M Air, for example — actually require a high resolution setting of at least 1024 x 786. So that isn’t the optimum solution.
• Zoom the contents of windows. Most applications have a zoom feature. For example, in Microsoft Word 2003 for Windows and 2004 for Mac OS, there’s a Zoom drop-down list right on the Standard toolbar. Choose an option from the menu or enter a new value in the text box there and press Return or Enter. I usually use 120%, unless the author of the document formatted it at some crazy font size like 9 points. Then I pop it up to 150%. I even had a document I worked on at 200% because between the small font size and the font design itself, I just couldn’t read it comfortably at any other magnification. Other programs, such as Excel, Adobe Reader (and Apple Preview, for that matter), Photoshop, and just about any other graphics or page layout program you can think of, have zoom features. I even have keystrokes remembered in some apps to toggle magnifications as necessary.

It’s odd because on one book I worked on, I’d submit Word files I’d been reading at 120% magnification and get them back from the copyeditor at 92% magnification. I’d have to pop them back up to read them. The benefit of using the magnification feature rather than simply changing font size is that layout isn’t affected. Document magnification settings can be set at anything and it’ll always have the same word wrap (except in Word’s Online Layout View perhaps) and it’ll always print the same. If you change the font size, however, you also change the word wrap and layout.

Of course, if you have trouble reading a printed version of the document, font size is just about the only solution.

But I’m not quite there. Yet.

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