How can I make the text on my screen larger?

The wrong thing

Changing the screen resolution is the wrong thing to do.

In the past, it used to be an approach that worked fairly well on CRT-style monitors, but with the rise of the LCD screen, running at anything other than the screen's native resolution can have unintended consequences.

For example, let's say that your display is capable of handling a resolution of 1920x1200 - that's its native resolution and the resolution at which it works best.

In an effort to make things appear larger, you then change the resolution that Windows uses to 1280x1024. Either of two things will happen:

• The 1280x1024 image will be stretched by the monitor to fill the 1920x1200 pixels that make up the display. You'll note that that's not an even multiple, so the display now has to "stretch" each pixel that Windows gives it across 1.5 pixels horizontally and 1.17 pixels vertically. Because there's no such thing as a fractional pixel, the monitor just has to try its best - often resulting in images that are indeed "bigger", but also significantly fuzzier.

• The 1280x1024 image won't be larger at all; instead, it will be centered by the monitor using 1280x1024 physical pixels on the screen and surrounded by a black border of unused pixels.

Neither effect is great and it often makes this worse instead of better.

Fortunately, there is a different approach.

The right thing: DPI

In Windows 7, right-click on your desktop and click Screen Resolution. No, we're not going to change the resolution after all, but the link for the setting that we do want is there:

Click Make text and other items larger or smaller.

As you can see, this setting is designed to pretty much do exactly what you're looking for - increase the size of everything - most notably text.

For comparison, I've superimposed the screen at 150% on to the normal 100%:

You can see that images, such as the desktop, are unaffected, but all of the text and icons as well as the task bar and windows controls are now 150% bigger than they were before.

Note that when you make this setting change, you may need to logout and then log back into Windows so that it can apply it.

DPI Direct

If the options of 100%, 125%, and 150% aren't enough, you can manually adjust the underlying setting.

DPI, or "dots per inch," is what the setting above controls. The default is typically 96 dots (or pixels) per inch, but you can adjust it to almost anything.

Once again, right-click on the desktop and click Screen Resolution, and then click Make text and other items larger or smaller.

In the resulting dialog, click the Set custom text size (DPI) link.

You can select a custom percentage by using the drop-down or typing in your own percentage value.

You can also click the ruler, hold and drag it to the right and left to make changes as well.

In either case, the text will be redrawn to show the effect of the proposed change.

Windows XP

Windows XP has the same concept for DPI settings, just in a different place.

Right-click your desktop and click:

• Properties

• "Settings" tab

• "Advanced" button

• "General" tab

The DPI drop-down in XP has two settings, Normal and Large, but it also has a "Custom setting..." option:

As you can see, it's the same custom dialog that's still used today in Windows 7.

Caveats

This concept of using a "dots per inch" setting to scale what's written to the screen has been a component of Windows for a long time. Applications aren't supposed to ignore that and most do not. Most play by the rules.

Most.

Unfortunately, you may encounter an application where the DPI setting has no effect. Occasionally, you may even encounter worse - applications that use the setting inconsistently so that changing it making a mess of that application's UI.

Blame the application; it's not playing by the rules.

And finally, if you make things too big, you may get a warning from Windows that the setting may result in some things not being accessible. A great example is if things are zoomed in so large that a dialog box is too big to fit on the resulting screen and its OK and Cancel buttons aren't visible. That's something that you'll simply need to compensate for one way or another - either by going back and reducing the DPI setting or by determining if there's another way to accomplish whatever it is that you're attempting to do without having things "appear" off-screen.

(This is an update to an article originally published November 17, 2004.)