Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. In this episode
let's look at different ways to zoom in on content in various apps on the Mac.
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So most apps on the Mac allow you to zoom in on content to make text and images larger and easier
to read or to zoom out to fit more of it onto your screen. But apps differ in how you do this. Some
have different functionality and some simply have different keyboard shortcuts or controls
to zoom in and out. Let's start here in Safari where you are probably viewing most content. In
Safari there are actually two different zoom modes. If you go to View and look for Zoom In
and Zoom Out you could see the keyboard shortcuts are Command + and Command -. Now Command Plus is
an odd keyboard shortcut because you're actually using Command Equals. But by convention over the
years it's just called Command Plus even though you're not using the Shift key so it's not really
plus. This will allow you to zoom in and zoom out. So this is what you get when you use these keys.
You could see I zoom in and both the text and images get larger. I can zoom back out as well.
But there's also a second Zoom mode. If you go to View and I hold down the Option key I could
see that Option Command Plus, and Option Command Minus, makes text smaller or text
bigger. So let's try that. You could see here the image remains the same size while the text
changes size. Now in a lot of apps where you can zoom, and right here in Safari, you can
use your fingers on your trackpad to spread them apart or bring them together to zoom in and out.
So I can zoom in and out. This actually does a third thing. You can see how I'm zooming the
entire page so I'm only see a portion of it. Now if you're using a mouse in Safari your best bet
is to use the keyboard shortcut. But there is one mouse function. Go into System Preferences
and then Mouse, under Point and Click there's Smart Zoom. If you have that turned on you can
double tap with one finger that's just tap on the surface of the mouse not click on the mouse.
If I double tap you can see it zooms in and another double tap will zoom back out. This
only takes to one level and then back again. How far it zooms in really depends
on the content and other things. So it's not as useful as the keyboard shortcuts.
So what about in other apps like the Finder. You can zoom in but you have to be in Icon Mode here.
You could use Command and then the Plus or Minus keys to zoom in and out. Now if you bring up View
Options you could actually see this here. You could see the icon size and you could adjust
that. You could also adjust grid spacing. If I use the Plus and Minus you could see how it's
changing the icon size. You can actually bring up a Control here on the screen if you go to View
and then Show Status Bar. You'll see this way to zoom in and out here. So you could
do it without using the keyboard. Note that if you switch to other views, like List View,
you could see there's no longer a way to zoom in. You can't zoom in on List View or Column View.
Although you do have the ability to change things like the icon size and text size in View Options.
Another place you may want to zoom in is in the Photos App. You can certainly do
that. As a matter of fact there's a control right here at the top for zooming in and out. You can
use the trackpad to do it with two fingers. You can also use Command and Plus and Minus
to do it. It works in all photos but also works inside of Albums.
Now a place that's halfway between the Finder and Photos is the Media Browser.
So say you're on a website and you want to upload an image you'll get to this
Choose Files to Upload dialogue here and there's the Media Browser. You go to that
and here you can zoom in and out but you're kind of at a loss as to how to do it because there's
no menu for a dialogue like this. But you can use two fingers on a trackpad to zoom in and out
but you can't use a keyboard shortcut for that. You could also hold the Option key
down and scroll up or down to change the view. So it works with the mouse.
How about in the Mail App. Sometimes you want to enlarge the text or images that comes in an
email. You can use Command and plus and minus to change the size of what you're viewing in Mail.
Preview is another place where this works. When you're viewing a PDF or image you can use Command
Plus and Minus to zoom in and out. There are even buttons at the very top of the screen to do that.
Under View you can go to Zoom To Fit, which is Command 9, or Actual Size which is Command Zero.
But what about Maps. Well Maps naturally has a zoom function. You can use Command Plus or
Minus to zoom in or out on a map or the Plus and Minus buttons right here at the bottom right hand
corner. But this isn't really zooming. This is changing the scale of the map. But notice the
text stays the same size. Look at the street names there. They stay the same size. So while
you're changing the scale of the map you're not really zooming in on the content.
There is a Preference in Maps Preferences for larger labels. So you've got one setting
there. But you can't really maintain the same scale and then zoom in on an area of the map.
So it works in a way that makes sense but perhaps not in a complete way.
Now the weirdest thing when it comes to zooming is how it works in Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. These
are primary apps that lots of Mac users use and you would think you'd be able to zoom in using the
standard Command Plus or Command Minus. But that doesn't happen because Command Plus and Command
Minus are used for bigger and smaller text for changing the font size. So how do you do it? Well,
you have to use a different command. Under View you'll see zoom and there's Zoom In and Zoom Out
but it's Command and then the greater than or less than symbols. Which means you're using the
Shift key as well to get to those. So using those commands you can zoom in and zoom out. You'll also
have a few other things here. Let me select this image and you could see under View, Zoom you have
Fit With, Fit Page, and Zoom to Selection which only works if you select something like a shape or
an image or something like that. Not if you select text. So this odd Command, Shift, and then greater
than or less than, works this way in Pages, Numbers, and Keynote and also in one other place.
That's in Notes. Notes also uses the same keyboard shortcuts although strangely
it calls them Shift Command Period and Shift Command Comma. It's the exact same shortcuts
except that instead of Command Greater Than or Less Than it's actually showing you the
exact keys you need to press. You could see here I could zoom in or zoom out on a Note. So this kind
of makes sense as long as you remember that apps like Pages, Numbers, and Keynote use Command + to
change the font size. So then for zooming Shift Command greater than or less than are used to
zoom in and out. But of course that may not work the same way in third party apps at all.
So you would think that what works in Notes would also work in Reminders but that's not the case.
Reminders there's actually no zoom ability at all. You cannot change the size of the Reminder's List.
That's kind of also true for Calendar although there is a bit of functionality there. Under View
you can get Make Text Bigger and Make Text Smaller, Command Plus and Minus,
so different than in Notes. But look what it does. It doesn't actually change the zoom on the
Calendar itself. It just changes the text size. So instead of being able to zoom in on a date,
perhaps to have more room to see all the events that are piled up in a single day, you actually
change the font size which makes it less room inside the box to see things. So there's no true
zooming functionality here in the Calendar. Just something to increase the text size.
Now the place where you would totally expect to find zoom is the News App because it's a great
news reader. It's much better, a lot of times, than using Safari to read news articles. Here,
indeed, you can find, under View, Zoom In and Out, and it's using Command Plus and Command Minus.
It will increase the text and images inside of a news article that you're viewing. But
it doesn't work in the main view of news. You have to be in an article.
Finally, there's Messages. If Calendar and Reminders don't zoom in you would probably
expect that Messages maybe doesn't. But, in fact Messages does zoom in very nicely.
Under View you've got Make Text Bigger or Make Text Smaller. You can zoom and
increase the entire conversation size here up to a point. Or make it smaller as well.
Then use Option Command Zero to bring it back to normal size.
So there are ten places that Zoom works really well. Another place where it works well is if
you go to Reader View in Safari. So if I go to Reader View here I can use Command Plus and Minus
to zoom in and out. You also have the ability here to do the same thing. You also, of course,
have the ability to zoom the entire screen using Accessibility. Go in System Preferences,
Accessibility, Zoom and you can turn it on using either the keyboard shortcuts or a scroll gesture.
Then you can zoom in like this on any portion of the screen. You can set it to Full Screen,
Split Screen, like this or picture-in-picture like this. Scroll in and out to see any part
of the screen in any app. It's completely independent of the app so any third party app,
no matter how few options it has, will work with this zoom feature in Accessibility because
it's actually zooming in on your screen not doing anything in particular with the app you're using.
So I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.