[vexingv]

ive had a 12" pb for awhile (but still primarily pc user) now and only recently have started to actually use it for schoolwork. b/t pc and versions of mac versions of ms office, i have to bump up the text zoom on all my documents to about 200% to make them readable. i have 20/20 vision (and hope to maintain that) so i dont understand how some ppl can manage to do work using 100% zoom.
ive seen in passing mentions that osx has a standard dpi of 72 whereas windows is 96 (i actually set mine closer to 125 or so). is there any way to set a higher dpi?

me and my eyes thank you.

edit: btw, some of you might say its just b/c of the (subpar) 12"pb screen, but even connected to the same 17" crt that my pc is connected i have to bump text zoom. i also know the 12" lcd is capable of producing better text (i vnc-ed fullscreen into pc excel and @ 100% it looked dramatically better than mac excel @ the unreadable 100% zoom)

[iREZ]

I don't understand...why not just set word to 200% whenever you use it? If you don't want that then you could set your PB screen to 800x600 (but it will be blurry). I don't see a problem with it being on 100% while I use word but most of the time I'll hook up my 'book to an external and do my serious work there. Also if you hit cmd + '+' while using Safari, you could increase the font size. Hope some of this helped, but I'm certain it didn't.

[vexingv]

with word i leave it set at 200% and the setting remains for the most part when i open new files. however with excel, this setting doesnt stay and each worksheet has its own zoom setting as well. this all gets to be very cumbersome when working with many files. while browsing, i use firefox which actually does allow for changes in dpi. it just amazes me how this setting can't be adjusted on the mac. i actually think i will do my spreadsheet work on pc excel just because of the readibility/text zoom issues.

[Anubis IV]

Well, if you're experiencing that issue across all of your applications, I'd suggest lowering your resolution to increase the font size, and that may very well be what you were talking about in the first place. Honestly, increasing the dpi will not make the text size change, it'll just make the text better defined and less pixelated (and eat up a little more CPU since you'd have to be drawing more pixels with each screen refresh). Besides that, there is currently no way to change the dpi of your display in Panther and below. The foundations for that capability will be in place in Tiger, but it won't be a user-accessible feature until we're beyond Tiger and on to 10.5.

If you're only experiencing that issue in MS Word though, then place the blame where it should be: on Word. Just bump up the zoom factor and you should be fine. Honestly, I don't know of anyone (except for the computer illiterate) that leave MS Word at 100% zoom. I set mine to 125% or 150% usually, and 200% is still comfortable for me (though a little large). 100% is just too small...so don't use it.

EDIT: And again, after reading your last post, I think you might want to learn what the differences are between resolution, dpi, and zoom, or rather, just what the heck they are. Seems that you're using them almost interchangeably, and they are different things.

EDIT 2: Oh, and shouldn't we all be using the term "ppi" instead of "dpi" since we're talking about displays on not printed pages?

[Devin Lane]

Just for perspective: I also have very good vision (I always run at max resolutions, etc), but I cannot stand text in Word under 150% zoom. Not really sure why this is, but whenever I set it to %150, I can see it just fine.

[Chuckit]

A higher resolution will make things smaller, not bigger, because more pixels are packed into the same space. At any rate, you can change the display resolution in the Displays preference pane.

[Big Mac]

Originally posted by Devin Lane:
Just for perspective: I also have very good vision (I always run at max resolutions, etc), but I cannot stand text in Word under 150% zoom. Not really sure why this is, but whenever I set it to %150, I can see it just fine.

Maybe you you're having trouble reading the text because you always run at max resolutions.

[Millennium]

The 72dpi versus 96dpi versus whatever doesn't actually mean much, because neither Windows nor MacOS is resolution-independent. If the screens were actually using these dpi settings, then the text size would not change at all.

You basically have two choices: lower your screen resolution (800x600 should work well), or continue to use Word's text zoom. It sounds as though you're not the only one who has this problem with Word, and you haven't mentioned any other apps having this problem, so Word's zoom is probably a better choice.

[vexingv]

ok dpi might not be the best term to use, but thats the one ive seen tossed around in windows and other apps (eg. firefox mentioned above). in Windows under their display applet in the control panel there is setting called "DPI setting". Here's what it says:
"if your screen resolutions makes screen items too small to view comfortably, you can increase the DPI to compensate." settings include normal (96 dpi), large (120), or custom. i think is a scaled zoom factor of some sort.
ihave my windows resoluton at 1024x768 and a dpi setting of 115. since the powerbook is an lcd any nonnative resolution (anything other than 1024x768) is pretty blurry. and as ive said before, i have vnc-ed from my powerbook to the pc at fullscreen and the text looks a lot better. word doesn't bother me as much as excel, whose zoom settings never seem to remain for every workbook/worksheet.

[Mithras]

Incidentally Tiger will have preliminary support for display "DPI" in that sense; but of course, it will make all the widgets bigger, and may not work well in all apps (just as in Windows, where changing the DPI makes many apps go funky).

For Excel, you can at least add a keyboard shortcut to zoom in. Click Tools:Customize:Customize Keyboard. Then choose 'View' from the list, then scroll down to find 'Zoom in'. Add a shortcut (I use <shift><option><command>=). Also add one for 'Zoom Out' (I use <shift><option><command>-). That makes it a little less annoying, anyway.

[TETENAL]

Originally posted by Millennium:
The 72dpi versus 96dpi versus whatever doesn't actually mean much

It means that 12 point text is 12 pixels high on Mac OS and 16 pixels high on Windows. Therefore the same document using the same display is more readable on Windows. And since Apple is selling displays with roughly 100 ppi ironically the Windows resolution is much closer to real size than that of Mac OS.

Changing the dpi setting without changing the actual resolution of the display will increase the size of text/objects on screen. That's great for people with low vision. Unfortunately it's not possible on Mac. The options on Mac are reducing the actual display resolution (which unfortunately blurs text on TFT displays), using the zoom features of the individual applications if available, or using the screen zoom thing of Universal Access.

[theolein]

Originally posted by vexingv:
ok dpi might not be the best term to use, but thats the one ive seen tossed around in windows and other apps (eg. firefox mentioned above). in Windows under their display applet in the control panel there is setting called "DPI setting". Here's what it says:
"if your screen resolutions makes screen items too small to view comfortably, you can increase the DPI to compensate." settings include normal (96 dpi), large (120), or custom. i think is a scaled zoom factor of some sort.
ihave my windows resoluton at 1024x768 and a dpi setting of 115. since the powerbook is an lcd any nonnative resolution (anything other than 1024x768) is pretty blurry. and as ive said before, i have vnc-ed from my powerbook to the pc at fullscreen and the text looks a lot better. word doesn't bother me as much as excel, whose zoom settings never seem to remain for every workbook/worksheet.

FWIW, I know what you're talking about: The setting in Display properties, advanced setting where you can theoretically raise the dpi setting from 96 dpi up to 125 dpi, which has the side effect of making the fonts bigger in all Win32 applications (one can even make them still larger by using the large fonts option in the same dialog).

Nope, there's no way of doing that in OSX. Apart from using 3rd party tools to change the fonts and their sizes, one can of course change the font size in the Finder and the Desktop, but that's not what you want. The no cost alternative, instead of lowering the resolution to 800x600, is of course to use the built in Zoom function in System Preferences->Universal Access. I have only used the on rare occasions, but using it exactly one notch, i.e. hitting Cmd-Opt-^ exactly once or at most twice (Cmd-Opt-' to zoom out again and Cmd-Opt-8 to turn zoom on or off) can be pretty useful as it zooms about to what the text would be at 125% to 150% in word and Excell.

I liked the Windows dpi settings feature very much as I used to have a Dell Inspiron with a 15" display and 1600x1200 resolution which rendered almost everything on Windows too small to read. Using the higher dpi setting helped in all applications except, sadly, Photoshop and Illustrator, which have hard coded text sizes in the palettes. In those apps the text remianded too small too use.

[nickm]

Originally posted by Chuckit:
A higher resolution will make things smaller, not bigger, because more pixels are packed into the same space. At any rate, you can change the display resolution in the Displays preference pane.

I can't believe how many people are suggesting running a flat panel display at anything less than it's native resolution. An iBook screen is just barely usable at 1024 by 768. Running it at 800x600 is insane.

The issue here, as others have picked up on, is that the iBook display has a fixed real-world resolution of around 105 dpi. The Mac OS is, in some sense, assuming that the display is 72 dpi, and so everything is too small. What the original poster wants to do is tell the Mac, "Hey, my real resolution is 105dpi" (thus "increasing" the resolution)

Word is most definitely NOT at fault here---the Mac is for not accommodating a higher-resolution display. Still, Mac OS X is moving surely but slowly towards a resolution-independent display. 10.4 will bring some of those pieces into place, but it will be a slow process since most apps have resolution-dependent assumptions coded within them somewhere.