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Rick-ITA

macrumors regular
Original poster
Sep 12, 2013
187
0
Hello.

I'm debating between buying a Macbook Air or a Retina Macbook Pro.

I like more MBA but what's stop me in buying it is that I fell Mac system fonts are too small for me at 1440x900 on a 13" display while 1280x800 on the same display are just ok.

I know I can adjust for dock, icons and icons name and obviously safari and other applications allow me to adjust the zoom.

But Mac, I found, does not allow to change system DPI as in windows so system fonts cannot be adjusted easily. What I mean is, for example, the title bar, system menu and application menu like:

office%20for%20mac16.jpg


I found that an application, Tinker Tool, allows to change this setting.

So here my question: does it work?
This is for me really a discriminant in deciding what to buy.

Moreover reading in tinker tool notes I found that

Can I use the default font settings to increase the size of fonts?

Yes and no. You can specify a larger font as your preferred default font for a certain usage category, as explained in the previous section. However, this might not be a good idea for certain applications, because you risk that texts will be clipped by surrounding elements, like boxes, buttons, etc. when they are rendered with larger sizes. Parts of the user interface could become unreadable.

The appropriate way to increase the size of fonts is to enlarge all parts of the user interface. This is possible by modifying the rendering resolution of the interface which is normally fixed at 72 pixels per inch. Different versions of OS X have very different features and limitations to do so and such changes cannot be controlled by simple user preferences. For this reason, this cannot be part of TinkerTool. With the limitations defined by each version of OS X, you can control the overall screen scaling factor by our alternative application TinkerTool System Release 2. Please see the official web page for more information.

Does the other program performs what I need? Any suggestion? I really like the Air form factor but before buying it I must be sure I will be able to work around this problem
 
EDIT: this is what I mean. Does it work?

System5-SnowLeo.png



I answer by myself. It works only in Snow Leopard. This menu is no longer available starting from lion. Damn!
So back to the original question, Tinker Tool works for what I need?
 
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