Diabolical system font eye-strain! Is this the end for baking soda's peepers?

April 21, 2007 11:15 AM

Let's say I spend long hours staring at a computer screen where some of the fonts are too small and I have no way of increasing them, which creates a diabolical eye-strain device of reasonable fonts mixed in with unreasonable system fonts. I normally have no vision problems otherwise. Is this going to damage my eyesight if I keep it up? (Medical opinions and links to medical articles welcome). And is Leopard's "resolution independence" or anything else in Leopard going to bring OSX near to where XP is in terms of being able to increase the system fonts without lowering the resolution? (I'm using a Macbook Pro).
posted by baking soda to health & fitness (6 comments total)

This isn't your question, but it may help you sometimes to zoom in with option-apple-plus and out with option-apple-minus. See settings in the universal access systems preferences menu.
posted by about_time at 11:26 AM on April 21, 2007

It can cause Computer Vision Syndrome if you keep it up. I'm pretty sure I already have this. I came to this site when doing a google search a while back that gave me some answers:

http://www.allaboutvision.com/cvs/

About the small text- I don't know what you could do if you don't have Windows. I find that taking short breaks from staring at the screen every so often by trying to focus my vision on things farther away (across the room, etc) helps.
posted by koshka at 12:17 PM on April 21, 2007

How big do you want the system fonts, and what sort of stuff are you trying to do? I'm a little confused, because in OS X most of the time I can get things pretty big...e.g., you probably know about using bigger fonts in the finder by going to View/Show View Options, so I assume those are not the system fonts you're talking about...

Some random internet dude suggests this technique to increase your system fonts, which might or might not be helpful
posted by leahwrenn at 1:57 PM on April 21, 2007

A) You can hold down control and use the wheel on a wheel mouse to zoom in and out on the screen.

B) Bump your monitor resolution down a notch or two

C) Alternately, check out the Universal Access system preference for some other visibility solutions.

Straining to read your computer screen is not good. Don't do it.
posted by Aquaman at 2:13 PM on April 21, 2007

Aquaman's (A) suggestion can be done on the trackpad of the MBP by holding down the control key and using two fingers on the trackpad like you do when you scroll down in most apps.
posted by birdherder at 2:31 PM on April 21, 2007

This might be helpful to you. Sounds like the current Macbooks may not be able to take full advantage of the Leopard's resolution independence. Bummer. The small text drives me nuts!
posted by HotPatatta at 3:16 PM on April 21, 2007