I’ve noticed in recent years that more and more apps only offer “small, medium, large” font size settings. My problem is simple. I am visually impaired and need VERY large fonts.

I need my font size set like this:

https://share.icloud.com/photos/08bSDwyyJZm2X4g1f9iZ6mreA

But instead, with more and more apps like Ivory for example, the biggest I can get is this:

https://share.icloud.com/photos/00eUunqHWyZkEWCuFpHlPmVEA

I suspect that the culprit may be Swift UI, but I have no evidence for this.

Does anyone understand the reasoning behind this trend, and is there any possible fix for end users other than begging application developers to have pity? :)

Thanks!

  • hydroptic@sopuli.xyz
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    20 days ago

    Oh yeah, and I just realized I’ve been a dum idjit and completely forgotten to mention the slightly hacky way you can enlarge some UI fonts that might help y’all @feoh@lemmy.ml & @Libb@jlai.lu.

    You may be familiar with this already, but by editing some system preference keys “manually”, you can crank up the default font sizes that apps, the OS, and some native UI elements use beyond what System Settings lets you do – both allowing for bigger font sizes in apps and the OS itself (but which can lead to UI bugs), and allowing changing eg. label or tooltip font sizes separately. This can only work for native apps, but even then sometimes it only sort of works at best and especially SwiftUI seems to just completely ignore these (because of course it fucking does).

    You can either use Tinkertool which also allows you to export and import the current state of all the configs that Tinkertool manages, and that’s pretty handy when you’re fiddling with your configs. It does eg. limit the system font size to max 24 for whatever reason though, so if you want to go over that limit you can hop in the Terminal and use defaults to add/change the preferences:

    (All of these take an int value)

    • NSFixedPitchFontSize
    • NSSystemFontSize
    • NSMessageFontSize
    • NSLabelFontSize
    • NSToolTipsFontSize
    • NSTitleBarFontSize
    • NSPaletteFontSize

    So for example to set the system font size to 15, you’d use defaults write -g NSSystemFontSize -int 15
    If you want to restore the default value I think it’s enough to just delete the key(s) you’ve changed: eg. defaults delete -g NSSystemFontSize.

    Caveat emptor, though: this is of course completely unsupported and you’ll probably run into UI funk depending on which sizes you change and by how much. For example NSLabelFontSize defaults to 10, and I’ve increased it to 12 which mostly works but some labels can get truncated if the label’s container doesn’t scale with the label font size which many apps assume will never change. It’s definitely not an ideal solution or even a good one by any means because UIs do kinda start borking once you change these too much, but might be worth a shot anyhow?

    • Libb@jlai.lu
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      20 days ago

      Thx for that tip, I will check that as soon as I can, as well as Tinkertool. This may help & it doesn’t matter (to me at least) the few issues that may or may not arise by doing that, as long as it makes things more readable to my old eyes ;)