On displays with very high resolutions, it may be desirable to have larger on-screen text and icons.

Increasing Text Size

How to Choose Fonts

To increase text size in any particular context, one generally needs to choose a larger font.

There are two broad types of fonts:

• Bitmap fonts are designed exclusively for on-screen use. Each size is individually drawn as a set of fixed-size bitmap images. For this reason, bitmap fonts cannot be scaled to arbitrary sizes, but are limited to the set of sizes for which they are drawn. Because of their hand-drawn nature, they generally have a very crisp on-screen appearance. Standard bitmap fonts in ArcaOS include “System Proportional”, “System Monospaced”, “System VIO”, “Helv”, “Tms Rmn” and “WarpSans”.
   
• TrueType and Type 1 fonts are defined in terms of mathematical vectors, and can be freely scaled to almost any size. However, they may not be as crisp-looking as bitmap fonts, especially at smaller font sizes. They may also be fractionally slower to draw on-screen when large amounts of text are involved. Standard Type 1 fonts included with ArcaOS are “Helvetica”, “Courier”, and “Times New Roman”. The selection of TrueType fonts varies depending on the options chosen at ArcaOS install time.

Bitmap fonts are generally better for on-screen text as long as they are available in the specific size and style you want.

A change to the desktop fonts may or may not be reflected in specific applications. Different applications may provide their own methods for changing the fonts they use. If you need larger fonts to be available in a specific application’s user interface, contact the application publisher.

Desktop Icons

The recommended way to increase the size of desktop icons is by using the Dynamic Icons feature provided with ArcaOS. Consult the Dynamic Items documentation and/or online help for details.