How to resize the menu bar?

chris fitzgeraldchris fitzgerald
Posted:
in macOS edited January 2014
Just got a new 20" G5 iMac for my wife, whose eyesight isn't as strong as mine. She'd like to make the menu bar and the font on it bigger. I'm pretty sure there's a way to do this because I stubled onto it in Panther, but I can't remember what it was. I even searched in the Tiger "Missing Manual" book and couldn't find anything. Any ideas?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 5
    rraburrabu Posts: 264member
    I'm not sure but you may want to poke around the Universal Access perference pane. I would guess that this kind of stuff would be there.
  • Reply 2 of 5
    dale soreldale sorel Posts: 186member
    Go into the Displays Preference panel and you can change your machine's resolution. This will do what you want (I think).
  • Reply 3 of 5
    placeboplacebo Posts: 5,767member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Dale Sorel

    Go into the Displays Preference panel and you can change your machine's resolution. This will do what you want (I think).



    No, it will make everything blurry, and the menu bar big and blurry in comparison.







    Open Quartz Debug, and there's an option in there somewhere to scale up the overall font size.
  • Reply 4 of 5
    chris fitzgeraldchris fitzgerald Posts: 88member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Placebo

    No, it will make everything blurry, and the menu bar big and blurry in comparison.







    Yeah, that's kind what happened when i tried it, so I put it back the way it was.



    Quote:

    Open Quartz Debug, and there's an option in there somewhere to scale up the overall font size.





    What's "Quartz Debug"?
  • Reply 5 of 5
    kim kap solkim kap sol Posts: 2,987member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Chris Fitzgerald

    Yeah, that's kind what happened when i tried it, so I put it back the way it was.



    What's "Quartz Debug"?



    Placebo shouldn't be offering Quartz Debug as a solution. First, you'd need to install the 'Developers Tools', and second, you'd be using an unsupported feature (which is quite buggy at the moment).



    There isn't a clean way of doing this in OS X at the moment. The only way that won't cause trouble but will look blurry or ugly is changing the resolution or using the 'zoom' feature in Universal Access.



    What you want is callled 'resolution independence' (no matter what resolution you're using, you can scale every element on the screen to whatever size you want). Windows offers some limited form of resolution independence but OS X offers even less (rest assured though that it's coming...Placebo was suggesting Quartz Debug because it's Apple's beginning efforts in making a resolution independent OS...but it's buggy at the moment.)



    Slightly off topic...ignore if you're not into technical discussions: It's too bad hardware wasn't quite powerful enough when OS X was first released. OS X was a chance for Apple to break free from old paradigms and concepts...wipe the slate clean and really start fresh. A fully metadata-savvy OS and resolution independente GUI would have been great.



    But now Apple will have make people transition to metadata and resolution independence slowly which will undoubtedly cause a mess of problems.

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