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Making Viewed Fonts and Images Larger (or smaller)

Ever go to a web site and find that the fonts are huge? Or, maybe they're too small for your eyes?

Our favorite web browsers, whether we use Internet Explorer 6, IE7, Firefox 1.5, Firefox 2, Opera 8 or Opera 9, have multiple ways for us to change the size of the words we see.

Some of those ways affect only the text. They'll let you have larger text or smaller text, but they won't affect image sizes.

Some others will automatically change the displayed image size along with the displayed text characters.

Each of the web browsers lets you choose your own default font (which is displayed if the web designer did not specify a font or a group of fonts as his choice). Each also lets you pick the font size you want, within a range. You can set these within the Preferences or Tools/Options sections of the browser's menu bar.

IE6, IE7 and Firefox all have menu bar items "View / Font Size" which will let us change font sizes also, IE gives you only 5 size choices. Firefox lets you step larger or smaller, one step at a time. Opera 9 doesn't seem to have such an option from the menu bar (or, at least, I didn't find it).

More often, though, I'm perfectly happy with my defaults and the size of fonts on web pages. Of course, there are a few that I'd like to be a little larger or a little smaller.

Fortunately, each of the web browsers gives us an ability to change font sizes on a page-by-page basis, too. we can do this by holding down the Control key and rotating the scroll wheel on your mouse.

[Tech note: if you don't have a scroll wheel on your mouse, it's time to get a new mouse. They're cheap.]

While each browser lets us make these changes, the effects in the browsers are not all the same. Let's look at the things we might want to do -- and what each browser does.

First, let's look at the most obvious difference when using Control-ScrollWheel

- IE7 and Opera 9 scroll away for larger, scroll towards for smaller
- IE6 scrolls away for smaller, scroll towards for larger (opposite of IE7)
- Firefox, Netscape scroll away for smaller, scroll towards for larger

What happens to images when we use the Control-ScrollWheel?

- Firefox and Netscape -- does not change image size
- IE6 does not change image size
- IE7 and Opera enlarge or shrink the images on the page at the same time
- IE6 does not change image size

How big (or small) can we make the fonts using the Control-ScrollWheel?

- IE7, Firefox2 and Opera9 appear to have a large range of size changes, larger and smaller, when you use the Control-ScrollWheel operation.
- IE6 only had the same limited 5-size range that was available in the menu bar's View / Font Size options.

Microsoft has also implemented these same Control-ScrollWheel zoom options in Excel, Word and PowerPoint (and perhaps other products, too). With IE7, the zooming direction is now consistent between IE and these other programs. With IE6, the control-scrollwheel zooming direction was opposite that of Word, Excel and Powerpoint.

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