Another OS X Question -- Menu bar fonts

General Questions
#1

Overall, I’m really impressed with how enjoyable it is to work with OSX. At this point it’s hard to believe I was ever satisfied with OS9. However, one thing that still bugs me is that the menu bar seems more crowded than it needs to be. There aren’t more items up there, but the font and spacing is such that often things don’t entirely fit, and items get dropped. I haven’t been able to find a setting that allows me to change the font size or spacing. I’ve even looked in the .GlobalPreferences.plist file, but if the setting is in there, I don’t recognizing it.

So, does anyone know of a way to adjust the menu bar font sizes or spacings in OSX? Thanks.

#2

Try TinkerTool, although I don’t know if it still tries to do menu bars. It did under10.1.x but the results weren’t always pretty.

Overall I agree with you. Apple make all the fonts huge, I guess under the assumption that we’d all be using 24" monitors running at 1600 x 1200 by now. Guess they forgot all about PowerBook screens :frowning:

There is a lot about MacOS X that would be helped by a generose dose of Monaco 9 and Geneva 10.

#3

I’m not sure you can change the menu bar font properties without being an Apple human interface designer and digging around deep in the Finder coding. You might try Mac OS X Hints and ResExcellence to see if anyone has any Finder hacks to do what you want.

BEWARE: Any system hacks could leave your system thorougly hosed! Be very cautious!

#4

Yeah, I’m using a 15 inch powerbook. I’ve got all the fonts in finder windows at size 10, but I haven’t been able to touch the menu bar.

Thanks for the tips peritrochoid. I’ll check them out.