Reducing font size on a PalmOS device

May 23, 2006 7:59 PM

Is there any way to reduce the font size used by my Palm OS device? Palm OS provides four font-size options for its system apps, but the smallest of these four is still much bigger than my ideal size.

I want to reduce the font size used in system apps so I have more info on a single screen (especially in Memos and Calendar), so I'm not looking for third-party apps that happen to have small fonts themselves -- although I'm grateful to AvantGo for enabling tiny fonts that illustrate how wonderful and legible those can be!

I'm running Palm OS 5.2.8 on a Zire 72.

I can't seem to find other people on mefi or on the web who've made this happen on their devices, but I really want to find a way!

posted by allterrainbrain to computers & internet (8 comments total)

http://www.palmgear.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=software.showsoftware&prodid=52925
posted by 4ster at 8:49 PM on May 23, 2006

Oops. Sorry to forget to link:


posted by 4ster at 8:49 PM on May 23, 2006

Thanks 4ster -- that looks like a great compromise that I will check out if it turns out to be the best option (that program's smallest font is still not as small as I want).

By squinting-and-counting I see:
- the height of Palm's smallest-system-font is 14 pixels.
- the height of AvantGo's smallest font is 8 pixels.
- the height of fonts40S5's smallest font shown in the screen capture (Handera 18) is 12, meaning its smallest available font (Handera 16) is probably 10 or 11.

So I guess my ideal is a font with height of 8 or 9 pixels.

What I mean by height is the number of pixels from the baseline pixel to the highest possible pixel.
posted by allterrainbrain at 9:37 PM on May 23, 2006

(I'm measuring this way because the numerals in the names of fonts in fonts4OS5 are clearly not connected to the actual pixel sizes in all cases -- see the screenshot in the link above)
posted by allterrainbrain at 9:56 PM on May 23, 2006

Here is a font someone purposely made smaller. It's based on the System font, so it seems to be precisely what you're looking for.

Freeware Palm has a large collection of alternative fonts, so if this isn't what you wanted you might find something else that's useful.

The limited fonts on Palm OS 5 is something I've been frustrated by as well, but haven't had time to install / test any of these alternatives.
posted by Mutant at 10:35 PM on May 23, 2006

I don't know PalmOS, but there are a bunch of nice small screen fonts in assorted formats here.
posted by flabdablet at 10:53 PM on May 23, 2006

Thanks Mutant -- that small system font and the other fonts at the Freeware Palm page are, unfortunately, not compatible with OS 5+ since they need a font hack that only works in OS 4 and below. I found a lot of pages myself that look promising at first and turn out to have this issue.
posted by allterrainbrain at 11:22 PM on May 23, 2006

SOLVED! 4ster, the sw you linked to is perfect - I should have just downloaded its trial first before even talking about it. As it happens, there ARE "tiny fonts" included in that sw and for some reason the tiniest are not included in the screenshot (I was assuming the point of the screenshot was to show the whole range available, but I guess not). So I marked 4ster "best" but I appreciate everybody's answers. Thanks -- this was my first mefi question and I got the answer really fast!
posted by allterrainbrain at 11:38 PM on May 23, 2006