Windows Vista™ Inside Out

Making Text Easier to Read

If you scroll through the Item list in the Advanced Appearance dialog box (see Figure 3-3) you’ll find several text elements that you can customize. In earlier versions of Windows, users who wanted larger text sometimes bumped up the point size for one or more of these elements. Scaling up this way was problematic, though, because not all elements of the Windows user interface could be scaled successfully. Dialog box text in particular was a problem, so that users sometimes found themselves looking at large title bars and scroll bars, large menu text, but small dialog-box text. Windows Vista offers a better way.

If you like to work at high screen resolutions but you find yourself straining to read the text, you can try ...