July 28, 2005
System Preferences | How to zoom in on the screen
Want to quickly zoom in on something that appears on your screen? A small, fuzzy CCTV image, perhaps? This capability is built into Mac OS X. It's designed to help visually impaired users, but it can come in handy for anyone.
When working with images in Photoshop for example, I now prefer the Mac screen zoom to Photoshop's. With the Mac screen zoom, the view follows the cursor, so unlike Photoshop, there's no scrolling involved. Or when using the living room Mac, (which acts as our TV, VCR, DVD, stereo, etc.) the screen zoom makes it possible to see what I'm doing from across the room, like browsing TV schedules or movie reviews on the web. A wireless keyboard and mouse are somewhat essential in this regard.
So — zooming in CCTV images...
To Enable Zoom
- Open System Preferences
- Select "Universal Access"
- Select "Seeing" from the row of buttons across the top
- Under "Zoom," click the "On" button
To zoom in
Hold down the ALT and APPLE keys and then press the PLUS key (beside backspace)
To zoom out
Hold down the ALT and APPLE keys and then press the MINUS key (beside the plus key)
Granted, the keys may be in slightly different places on a laptop keyboard. And granted also, I'm using Tiger. In your version, the button to turn on Zoom is slightly different.
If you want to make adjustments to the Zoom behaviour, go back to:
System Preferences > Universal Access > Seeing, and in the Zoom area, click the "Options" button. Then fiddle with the settings and test it out to find out what they do exactly.
Posted by Brad at 01:12 AM | Comments (2)
