I’ve spent some time looking around to see if I could find a solution and after reading a little I’m starting to think this is not possible. In Windows suggestions are to use UI scaling (or similar naming) but I’m using an Intel Mac Mini. This problem is becoming more difficult for me, on 2K/4K monitors the text is getting really tough to read. Up’ing the font size would help immensely if possible.
I’m hoping someone is going to make me look like an absolute dumba$$ and say, just do this… or that… open to any suggestions / ideas. Thanks for the community’s time.
Having a monitor with very tiny pixels would surely be wasted for me. From the CRT days many decades ago up to most LCD panels 10 years ago the dot pitch of “good” monitors has been somewhere around 0.2mm. Making the dots smaller is at least 80% marketing hype.
I did buy a 4k monitor a few years ago, but it’s a pretty big one. (1080mm diagonal, I think that’s 43 freedom bananas).
945 mm / 3840 pixels = 0.246mm horizontal pitch, and that is very close to perfect for me. At normal reading distance (600mm) I am not able to see individual pixels. I would need to use glasses to see them, or a magnifier, but with this big monitor I really don’t need glasses for PC work.
I’ve been looking a bit in the preferences, but I do not see an option for text size, but only for icon size (In: Preferences / Preferences / Common / User Interface / Toolbar Icon Size).
But as far as I know, all modern os’es have options to change the text size for high density displays with small pixels.
I’ll take a closer look in the options for Mac OS, I considered but expected it to effect ALL apps I run (and likely will). At this point - “Get better glasses” is the winner lol.
I assume you have some method to watch TV at home. Most TV’s can be used as PC monitors. It may be worthwhile to test it out for a day or so see whether you like a big monitor enough to invest some money into it.
I fully expect my monitor to last 15 to 20 years, and the cost per year is then pretty much negligible.
One option is to give a few other monitors I have hanging around a try - appreciate your advice. I might just pop a feature request for a future version that would allow a SMALL / MEDIUM / LARGE option for UI text, but I realize they have other more important things to work on then this.
I tried “mac os change font size for individual application” on google, and it gave an AI overview with a way to set font size for individual applications. It may or may not work and I won’t repeat it here because I can’t test it.
In general, using a smaller than the default font size (smaller relative to the base size in menus etc.) in a UI is problematic. All size combinations, depending on system font size, scaling etc. don’t work well because even when the base size is large enough, the smaller size may stay too small, and making the font setting larger may make the base size too large. Using a smaller size for some UI elements may be very enticing to an application developer but isn’t necessarily wise.
Sadly I’m currently running MacOS 12 Monterey, but this is definitely a possible solution, I will update to the latest, if possible on this hardware. Thanks for pointing this out, I did check Accessibility but there was nothing there other then Zoom feature (for me).
Guessing you’re on an iMac? I remember settings like brightness, text size , etc on the internal LCD, rather then the externals like my Mac Mini I don’t get anything related to Text size.
I do honestly appreciate everyone’s suggestions. Still considering the OS version upgrade to get the problem solved.
