How to increase font size on iMac?

[3Hotdogs]

[Lettuce Be]

1. Start in System Preferences

System Preferences is found in upper left-hand corner, under the little Apple, click that and you'll see a drop-down menu with first one being System Preferences. Open then find Displays (usually toward the bottom), click Displays. Now you'll see Resolution, and usually "Default for Display" is checked. Check Scaled instead.

Now you can choose to increase the size of all apps at once. I use the first choice directly to the left. The largest size warns that some apps may not fit correctly. It's easy to switch back so go ahead and try each to see which works best.

If you just want it larger in an app, usually you can make an adjustment under the View tab. For instance Chrome has a Zoom In (makes text larger) or Zoom Out (text smaller) choices. It only changes for that specific page, not the entire app.

Hope this helps, and if you wanted something more specific just ask.

[3Hotdogs]

2. System preference shows only "1 update."

Display does not appear on the screen.

[CloudWatcher]

4. System Preferences

The System Preferences application has a ton of panels.
One of them is "Software Update" but others include "Displays" and "Network" and "General".

If you're just seeing "1 update" you're looking at the "Software Update" panel within System Preferences. You can click the left-arrow to go back to the full display of panels or quit and restart the system preferences application.

[Louis1895]

3. Command + may work for your needs

I am in Safari right now and if I want a larger font, I type "Command+". For a smaller font, "Command–".

That may not always suit your needs or be consistent from page to page.

[3Hotdogs]

5. FUKKIN A !

That did it.

[Louis1895]

6. Outstanding!

Glad it worked for you.

[3Hotdogs]

7. The answer was command-shift-+

Thanks for your input.

[CloudWatcher]

9. Application specific

Note that cmd+ and cmd- are specific to the application you're using (Safari or Textedit or whatever). And not all applications support cmd+ and cmd- to change font size.

Changing the screen resolution (using the "Displays" panel in System Preferences) can make each "pixel" on the screen bigger (or smaller), so everything appears bigger or smaller by default -- across all your applications.

And in case you want to explore a little more:

If you have poor vision, there is a wonderful (and almost unknown) feature in macOS where you can temporarily "zoom into" the screen and magnify what you're looking at. I use it all the time, but it is not enabled by default.

If you are interested, the steps are (sorry, it is more than one step to enable it, but then it's easy to use):

1) launch the System Preferences application (you can find in in the Applications folders with all the other applications, or use the shortcut under the Apple menu in the top-left).
2) find the "Accessibility" panel (use the View menu and find Accessibility or click on it in the list of panels).
3) find the "Zoom" entry in the left section of the Accessibility panel
4) click "Use scroll gesture with modifier keys to zoom"

This will enable "zoom" mode where you can hold down the control key while scrolling to zoom into (and back out) of the screen to temporarily make something more readable.

The settings in Zoom allow for a lot of different styles of zooming and different key-combinations to invoke it.

Anyway, this zooming works with anything on the Mac screen. It doesn't need support from each application. It takes a little getting used to, but I find it to be very very useful!

[usonian]

8. What I find helpful

Besides the command (shift) plus in safari,

Command, scroll in Firefox, and

Finder, show view options, increase font size. Helps my aging eyes a lot.

I see an aA ( increase font size) on the URL bar in safari, next to READER, which helps enormously to wipe out clutter, sidebars ( I hate sidebars) and make text readable.

Damn the habit of light gray text on white background. Sometimes, dark mode works. When it does, readability goes up 5X, IMNSHO.

Oh, there's also a page zoom in safari settings.


HTH