Comments on: Mastering Safari, customizing your Appearance preferences

By: Fredrick Wehn

Fredrick Wehn — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 18:32:50 +0000

Good outline. I love to see clearly Martha

By: Clare Harding

Clare Harding — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 21:02:41 +0000

I would like the highlighted “viewed search results” in Google etc to be in red or green. At the moment the difference between viewed and unviewed results is too subtle for me to see easily.

By: Brandon Kem

Brandon Kem — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 23:59:04 +0000

Goto Safari in your menu.
Choose Preferences
Choose Appearance/Text
Next to the first line example, choose select.
Modify the size of the font to your liking.

By: Bill Metcalfe

Bill Metcalfe — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 16:53:23 +0000

And more from my Dec 30 post just above: this also applies to Google search. Too small. Magnify it and then other sites are too big.
Bill Metcalfe

By: Pietro

Pietro — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 17:03:41 +0000

I have overlapping text on a few websites like Amazon, etc… I have the standard fonts in place in appearance… how do I fix this? Thanks

By: Bill Metcalfe

Bill Metcalfe — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 05:11:39 +0000

In Safari, when I open gmail, the inbox font is too small. It just started doing this. If I magnify it a couple of steps, then that makes the font in other sites too big. So the size of Gmail seems to have gotten out of sync with all other sites. It is annoying because I go back and forth between gmail and other things a lot. This does not happen in Firefox. Thoughts on this? Thanks
Bill Metcalfe

By: Scott Haneda

Scott Haneda — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 02:39:30 +0000

@Bob If the URL ends in an image format such as .jpg, .gif, or .png then the browser should auto scale the image. Safari does this. If the image is too large, it will be scaled to fit the window. Your mouse pointer will turn to a magnifying glass with a plus symbol on it. Click the image once and it will change the size to 100%. The mouse will now be a magnifying glass with a minus symbol.

If the image is too large and the URL doesn’t end in an image format, then the image is being constrained by the HTML/JavaScript/CSS code of the underlying website. You can work around this in a few ways.

One way, is to look for a Safari Extension that is designed to display all images of a page in a new tab. Searching for Safari Extensions will yield lists of extensions in which you can find something in the “images” category.

Probably the easiest would be to right click, or control click on the image, which will cause a contextual menu to pop up. Select the menu listing that says “open image in new tab/window”. At that point, the image will behave as explained in the first paragraph above.

Not all images will be able to be right clicked on, even if they appear to visually meet this criteria. Some images can be pushed to the background via code like JavaScript or CSS making the image reside on a “layer” underneath what you are perceiving your click to actually happen on.

Hope that helps.

By: Bob

Bob — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 21:51:39 +0000

How do you make images that are too big for the browser automatically shrink down to fit?

By: Namsong

Namsong — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 04:27:46 +0000

Thank you for your step by step demonstration to help people like me to understand. I am new to computer and didn’t know what is default text encoding is for, so I try so hard to erase the display of western( ISO Latin 1) exc… I thought it was the porn side so I even paid person to rid of it but he didn’t succeed. But you really help me a lot so thanks again. namsong

By: Kenneth Barr

Kenneth Barr — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 01:46:12 +0000

Cheers Scott,

I think its now sorted itself out, thanks for the detailed comment
very much appreciated it. Also I like to say the people on this site are really friendly so thanks.

By: Scott Haneda

Scott Haneda — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 21:45:50 +0000

@Kenneth, by selecting “Zoom In” and “Zoom Out” you should also have the text made larger or smaller. At least, that is what happens for me. You may want to try playing with the “Zoom Text Only” Setting.

Perhaps you could provide a more detailed explanation of the problems you are having.

Maybe you are merely asking what to do, in which case, select the item in the menu, or click on the larger/smaller “A” icon in the Safari Toolbar, if it is enabled.

By: Kenneth Barr

Kenneth Barr — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 00:44:45 +0000

Hi, can someone please help me with the fonts on websites?
I go up to the View Menu in Safari but it shows Zoom In and Zoom Out. So how do I change that to Make Text Bigger and Smaller?

By: Scott Haneda

Scott Haneda — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 19:26:19 +0000

@Jordan If your Safari preferences for fonts are set to Standard Font at Times 16, and you are not getting the correct fonts, it could be a few things. Trying to narrow it down can be a little troubling.

I would perform these steps:
1) Create a new account in OS X, you can call it “test” and login to that account. Does the problem happen in that account? If it does then the issues is deeper than just Safari, if it does not, then the issue is something in your account.

Once you do step #1, you are safe to delete the “test” account.

I am going to assume that the new account will show the fonts correctly. In that case, move to step #2

2) Quit Safari. Open your home folder at /Users/your-user-name and open the Library folder. You will see a folder called Safari. Move that folder to your Desktop. Now, also in the Library folder in your home folder, open the Preferences folder. You will see a file called “com.apple.Safari.plist”, move that file also to your desktop.

3) Now launch Safari. Has the problem gone away? I will suspect that it does. If it does, quit Safari, and move back into the Library folder, the Safari folder. You will see a new one already exists, and will have to delete that one first. Open Safari, most of your settings will now be back. If the problem has gone away, you now know you have a corrupt preferences file. Throw away “com.apple.Safari.plist”, it will have been recreated now.

If the problem is still there, you can go ahead and put the preferences file back in place. You will have to replace the new one that was auto created when Safari noticed you moved the original out of the way.

4) If you have ruled out the Safari folder in Library, and the Preferences file, this means that your fonts are somehow messed up. The trouble is, it could be fonts in your users folder, or fonts higher up in the system area. Let’s start with the above steps, and see where that gets you.

By: jordan

jordan — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 15:34:34 +0000

My younger brother has messed with the fonts.

I changed the fonts under preferences to the standard ones but on some websites (google and gmail for example) some of the fonts are in this childish font which is super annoying. I can’t seem to find any other font settings and he doesn’t remember how he changed it.

Help anyone?

By: Pat St. Onge

Pat St. Onge — Fri, 29 May 2009 15:03:51 +0000

Thanks Scott!

By: Scott Haneda

Scott Haneda — Sun, 17 May 2009 04:28:14 +0000

@Veronica, are you use this is not specific to a certain set of sites? Some sites like to make it so when you hover over a link, not only do the links change color, but they change size as well.

Do you have an example?

By: Scott Haneda

Scott Haneda — Sun, 17 May 2009 04:26:55 +0000

@Pat I believe you have clicked the small “chicklet” in the upper right of the window, which collapses the top toolbar. Click it again, and the toolbar should come back.

By: Pat St. Onge

Pat St. Onge — Sat, 16 May 2009 20:30:12 +0000

While using Safari today, the display font inexplicably changed, no clue why. But what its using, I can barely read. I am trying to change the font back to the default. But when I go to Preferences, the ONLY menu that pops up is “Bookmarks”, weird, huh? Is there another way I can get to the Appearances menu?

If I can’t solve this, I will have to switch browsers, although Safari has been my favorite.

Thanks for any help.

By: Veronica McDavid

Veronica McDavid — Sat, 16 May 2009 15:50:05 +0000

Doesn’t anyone have a problem with spontaneous changes in font size as the cursor moves around the screen? This really drives me (and many people I know) nuts, and we can’t figure out how to stabilize the font size.

By: bb

bb — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 12:42:48 +0000

i’m having some issues. My Google toolbar is huge! But my address bar is super tiny. It almost looks reversed. Please help!

By: Scott Haneda

Scott Haneda — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 02:35:41 +0000

@barry, if you are using hotmail, you will have to use their limited formatting tools to adjust the font size. If you move to a custom email application, such as Apple’s mail.app, you would be able to do this a with a little more ease. Email is not the best way to reliably format a message to someone. Every email application tends to do things a tad bit different.

By: Barry

Barry — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 01:37:22 +0000

when I send an email (hotmail) to someone, I want it to come out larger in size when they receive it. How do I do this?
Thank You in advance.

By: MikeP

MikeP — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 13:32:36 +0000

@Scott Haneda”If you read English text, this should be left alone, and set to “Western (ISO Latin 1)”.”

If I set Safari to the above setting, punctuation does not display properly. I find I have to use Unicode (UTF-8). Not sure why.

By: Joseph

Joseph — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 21:10:16 +0000

I have found the Skia font to be a very good one for Safari. Much easier on the eyes than Times.

By: Scott Haneda

Scott Haneda — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 15:00:51 +0000

@IanF, yes, that could be confusing. To me, I would think the fact that the word “Times” was in the font face Times as well, would be the give away. That is exactly the line of thinking I want to avoid, you raise a great point, we made an edit to reflect that.

Sometimes we all get tunnel vision, thanks again.