To change these preferences in the Mail app on your Mac, choose Mail > Preferences, then click Fonts & Colors. The font and font size for viewing the list of messages in classic layout only (where the message list is above the messages). Click Select to use a different font.

Click to expand.Thanks everyone for posting. I had the same prob. Cured by going to: System Preferences -> Hardware -> Mouse Select the 'Screen Zoom' checkbox Select 'Screen Zoom' -> Options 'Zoom while holding' ^ Control Then to enlarge the screen image by 1. With trackpad - Control + Two Finger scroll 2.

With mouse - Control + mousewheel in or out Once enlarged, moving the cursor to the edges of the display will move the display to the desired portion. As always, completely un-intuitive, but effective once you've decoded the twisted minds that wrote the op system code. Just received 17' Macbook Pro. One reason I upgraded was for the the beautiful crisp and clear 1900 x 1200 high resolution antiglare screen. And now I need to squint to see the user interface system fonts and icons. The only remedy I have found so far is to run Windows where this is an easy adjustment, reduce screen resolution to a fuzzy focus, or zoom in and out.

Very frustrating. DO NOT buy a beautiful high resolution screen if you need to see the user interface. Free mac backup. Apple has come a long way but they have clearly dropped the ball here.

There's no built in systemwide means of adjusting the font scaling, short of running at a lower than native Resolution. In general, OS X is a fairly poor choice for everyday use at a distance of 10 feet from the screen. That said, you have a few options: You can increase font sizes on an app by app basis.

The main one you'll be concerned with, it seems, is Safari, where you can adjust the default display fonts for web pages under Preferences->Appearance, and on any given page, you can adjust the displayed fonts on any given page you are viewing with ⌘ +. You can also make use of the built in 'Zoom' feature in OS X. To enable this, under System Preferences, go to Universal Access and turn on 'Zoom'.

This will enable you to zoom in on a portion of your screen at greatly increased magnification with a keyboard shortcut. Some people love this, but I find it slightly disorienting. You might also want to investigate whether one of the systemwide 'theming' apps will work for you.

The only one I know to work currently with 10.6 is. You can probably find more info to assist you in taking this approach over at the but be advised that this sort of 'UI skinning' tends to be frowned on by Apple and break frequently.

It's something of a high maintenance option. Finally, if you're really just concerned with home-theatre type usage here, you might want to look into any of the many FrontRow replacement apps out there that offer better support for Hulu, Vimeo, Pandora et al. Some of the major names in this field are,. There is a way by using command line parameters and it works throughout the system. (for other readers: the solution works for MacOS X 10.6 'Snow Leopard', but not in 10.7 'Lion' or 10.8 'Mountain Lion') Taken from If you want to increase the size of the menu bar font, you may want to try this. It should work on Leopard. You will need to launch Terminal (its located in Applications -> Utilities).

Enter the following command. Defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleDisplayScaleFactor 1.5 Then try launching some applications. You should see the menu bar size change as well as the application. The last number '1.5' in the command means 150%.

If you want to reset back to normal, use: defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleDisplayScaleFactor 1.0 Depending on your screen size and preference, you may want to play around with the number. An unfortunate sideeffect is that everything in the webbrowser gets 'shifted to the right' due to the increased size. However the size is otherwise great on our 42' tv, can actually read the top line (apple, file, edit etc). To be able to see the 'post your answer' button on the bottom of the screeen here I had to use cmd+ '-' to shrink the website. I could have sworn there used to be a preference to do this before, but I can't find it - perhaps a more able SuperUser-ee will know where it went.

There are a couple of things you can do, though: • Try turning off LCD font smoothing, either entirely or for a higher threshold in the Appearance section of System Preferences. • Switch to a lower resolution in the Displays section of System Preferences. This will make everything bigger, at the expense of lower graphics fidelity.