Large Monitors - Text Too Small To Read?
If you have a large monitor, perhaps 20″ or larger; or if you have a super high resolution laptop screen, then perhaps you have encountered the small text that a high resolution screen can leave you with.
The Tip of the Week from Bill Myers Online offered a solution.
Bill’s idea is this:
You can right click on your computer desktop, select properties, select ‘appearance’, and change the ‘text size’ from ‘normal’ to ‘large fonts’. Then click ‘apply’.
Doing this will instantly increase the size of text in Windows displays - and you’ll finally be able to realize how great your large screen monitor really is.
While this probably works fine for Bill with the applications he uses, let me warn you of what you are likely to encounter. Applications that are not 100% Windows aware & compatible, which is about 99.9% of the applications out there, will have trouble rendering the larger text properly in menus, dialog boxes and button text. In fact, you may find the buttons now have inadequate text on them to know what they do.
If you use strictly Microsoft applications and other high end graphics applications, this may not be a problem. But with my clients I have seen this problem in spades.
My solution? Simple. Set the resolution to something you can work with. With older or cheap laptops, this isn’t as easy. Or with el cheapo flat panels, either. Flat panels and laptop screens sometimes have limited resolutions that look good enough to use; or that work out with their widescreen format.
For instance; I use a pair of Samsung 204B 20″ monitors. I could set the resolution to 1600 x 1200 and put all kinds of stuff on the screen. I couldn’t read any of it without squinting or using binoculars, but I could sure get a bunch of stuff on the screen.
Instead, I set the resolution to 1280 x 1024; a nice compromise that lets me utilize the larger screen real estate, yet renders text large enough to read.
