Hint: Display scaling for 11.6 MBA

[freitas]

This is an old hint used by the hackintosh netbook crowd. I love the 11.6 but late at night my astigmatism can make the small text hard to read. Fortunately, it is easy to change the scaling on a global and per application basis in OSX.

open Terminal and enter the following command:

defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleDisplayScaleFactor 1.2

To set it back enter
defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleDisplayScaleFactor 1

To see what the current scaling is enter:
defaults read NSGlobalDomain AppleDisplayScaleFactor

You can also apply scaling on a per app basis. But first you need to find the programs preference file.

For iTunes you would enter:
defaults write com.apple.iTunes AppleDisplayScaleFactor 1.2

Some users have noted issues during startup with scaling not at 100% so use at your own risk.

 

[slazareth]

Interesting. Any screenshots of the differences? Also what kind of issues were people experiencing? Think this probably had something to do with the hackintosh rather than the scaling?

 

[snorkelman]

have never used it personally on a real mac, on the hacks main problem I had with setting anything other than normal 1.0 is it leads to slight graphics corruption in firefox etc and some dialog box sliders dont take kindly to the rescaling imposed (eg no squint ends up with no horizontal line in the slider)

Second issue was solely applicable to using values greater than 1.0 - you could get in situation where dialog boxes didnt resize to accomodate the increased font size (e.g. VLCs preferences dialog or right click menu in firefox) End results of that were text that was chopped off mid phrase or text where the top part of the first line was missing or dialog boxes where the buttons were off the visible area of the dialog.

for folks setting less than 1.0 values to make stuff smaller (ie setting 0.8 on 1024x600 res displays) those second probs wouldnt apply - at worst you just got kinda funky looking dialogs that had much more room than the shrunken text they contained required

 

[freitas]

I tried 1.2 for safari, and seemed to work ok. YMMV.