Presentation Magnification

January 30, 2006

Here at VSLive! 2006 San Francisco, I've been sitting through a lot of presentations. Unfortunately, I've spent a disproportionate amount of that time staring at tiny, unreadable 12 and 10 point IDE text.

Presenters, please don't do this to your audiences. If you can't pre-scale the font appropriately in the application, make use of one of the many automatic magnification utilities out there.

Heck, you can even use Windows XP's built in magnifier utility: Start, Run, Magnify.

magnifier-screenshot.png

The options for magnify.exe are limited but entirely servicable:

  • It can automatically follow:
    • the mouse cursor
    • the keyboard focus
    • text editing
  • Click and drag the magnification surface to move it. It can float as a window or it can dock to any side of the screen like the taskbar.
  • Drag the corners to resize the surface.
  • The magnification is adjustable from 1x to 9x.

In the screenshot above, I have the magnification window docked to the top of the screen. The IDE is maximized normally under it. Since magnify follows all my mouse and keyboard actions automatically, everything I do is now perfectly visible -- even from the last row of the room.

Posted by Jeff Atwood
3 Comments

Thanks to this post I found a 14th evil thing that happens to me when I try to run as non admin (a href="http://nonadmin.editme.com/HowTo)"http://nonadmin.editme.com/HowTo)/a ...
... admins have a Run option, non-admins dont

Ho hum

RichardH on February 16, 2006 4:42 AM

You know, sometime you stumble upon something and just have to say aha!

RED on November 14, 2008 5:15 AM

In OS X, it's as simple as enabling the Zoom option under the Universal Access system preference, and then typing Command-Option-Plus to zoom in and Command-Option-Minus to zoom out.

Adam Rosenfield on November 27, 2008 8:24 AM

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