How can I make the text on my screen larger?
Hi, everyone. Leo Notenboom
here for askleo.com.
Here's just one example of this very common question.
I'm old Grin,
so I need to use a magnifying glass to read a lot of the screen words.
I suppose that they are in a six or eight point font.
Can I make the screen text larger, say to a ten or a twelve point font?
I know exactly how you feel, I really do.
There's a reason I wear trifocals, right?
The good news is that it's actually,
especially with most recent versions of Windows, relatively easy to make.
Not just the text, but everything on the screen bigger.
The bad news, there's also an easy way to do it wrong.
I'm going to show you both ways, tell you which one to avoid.
So let's switch over here.
We're running Windows Eleven.
This is the same for windows ten and windows eleven.
So I'm going to show you both the right way and the wrong way.
Let's start with the wrong way, right?
Click on an empty area in the desktop and click on Display Settings.
The setting that you should not change is display resolution.
You'll notice I've got a bunch of different options here.
And indeed, if you were to choose one
of these other options, it would make everything bigger on your display.
Maybe, and I have to say maybe,
because it really depends on the display you're using, the monitor that's involved
here, sometimes it'll show everything at exactly the same size with a black
border all the way around it, because it's not taking up the entire screen.
Sometimes it'll stretch, sometimes it'll do weird things.
This is not the way to do it.
The reason that so many people do it this
way is it used to be the way to do it when you had CRTs.
We've got a different way these days.
So instead of looking at display
resolution, what we're looking at instead is called scale.
Now, if we do this drop down,
you'll see that we have three or four different settings.
The actual list will differ depending
on your specific display, your specific graphics card and so forth.
But you will almost always have something
that is greater than what you are using it at.
For example, you can see here,
I've got 100% as being recommended for this machine.
If I were to now select 175%, everything just got bigger by 175%.
And in fact, I can scroll through this
list and you can see it's just easier to read.
The icons got bigger, the text got bigger, everything got bigger.
Except, of course, for your images because they're not scaled.
So that is the right way to make everything bigger.
Now, it doesn't have to be 175%.
You may find that 125 is sufficient. That's great.
If 125 works for you, that's good, because it allows you to actually have
more on the screen by not making it quite so big.
You'll notice that this window
specifically that I'm looking at right now, it fits on the screen at 125%.
It fits on the screen at 150%.
But at 175%, it's starting to go off the bottom here and may not actually fit.
The same is true for the applications you use.
So choose the smallest one you can get
away with that's big enough for you to be able to read and see easily.
I'm going to take this one back to 100% real quick.
Now, there is another option here.
You'll notice so far all we've really done
is take the recommended or the offered options in this drop down.
But there's also this arrow here that kind of indicates there might be some more.
We'll click on that.
Now we've got the option to change different things.
We can use a custom scaling.
You'll note that we have the option of 102,500 and 5175.
If those weren't enough, you can specify a number between 105
hundred here, and Windows will do its best to scale things to that degree.
Go for it if you need to.
If the number that is available to you
in that drop down isn't big enough, give this a try.
You can also see that there are options here to change text size.
This allows you to do other things that are
not changing everything on the screen, but will change most of the text size.
Now, I do have to say that this assumes
that the applications pay attention to how this is set in Windows.
Most applications do these days, many don't.
My recommendation is that you do use this display settings scaling if at all
possible, and then if you need to change it to something that isn't available
in the drop down that's independent of the applications themselves.
Most applications shouldn't really know or care about this.
If we start changing text size
specifically, some applications may not play nice.
Now, whenever I talk about changing
the text size, I get a bunch of feedback from people
who are saying that you don't need to do any of that.
Just hit control plus or Control minus.
Yes and no.
So here is my website in my browser,
and indeed, if I hit Control Plus, things get bigger.
I can hit Control Plus repeatedly,
and in fact, I can make things pretty darn big by hitting CTRL Plus repeatedly.
Control Zero, by the way, returns everything to what it was.
And Control Minus makes things smaller, which is an interesting way to get more
on your screen, I guess, if you can still read it.
The issue with Control Plus
and Control Minus is that it only works in the application you happen to be using
at the time, and not all applications support it.
So, for example, I'm in a browser.
Almost all the browsers do this.
So if you're having trouble reading a web page, by all means hit Control Plus.
Make things bigger.
Read it hit Control Zero to go back to the way it was and you're good.
However, if you're running another
application, I'm just going to go ahead and run Notepad.
If I type in some text and I hit
CTRL Plus, the text gets bigger, but Notepad does not.
Other applications may or may not support this, so you'll have to experiment.
If the application you use, your email program,
your web browser or whatever, support Control Plus and Control Minus.
Use them. They're great.
I love them for temporarily making things bigger or smaller.
If you've ever noticed very often
for Ask Leo articles, I'll have like a really big but high
quality image or high quality screen capture.
All I've really done is I've probably
taken this to its maximum, grab the image and then reset it back.
That's a very useful technique when it works, I hope.
These two techniques the display scaling,
which is the right way to change the size of everything,
and Control Plus and Control Minus, which work in most, but not all applications.
I hope these help you read things including Ask Leo a little more easily.
For updates, for comments,
for links related on all this, visit askleo.com/8936.
I'm Leo Notenboom.
And this is Ask Leo! Thanks for watching.