The concept of 'screen zoom' on the Mac has made huge strides since the days of the magnifying glass on wires made for the Mac SE (anyone recall the name?) and has even come a long way since OS 9's CloseView control panel. In this article we will discuss text zooming and screen zooming under Mac OS X 10.2 or later. (10.3+ required for custom system zoom key commands)

Most web browsers will let you increase the font size of the page as if you were in a word-processing or page layout program.

Safari uses the 'Text Size' buttons, which can be made visible by choosing "Customize Address Bar…" from the View menu. With previous versions of Safari it can be selected from the View menu.

Command-plus (actually equals) and command-minus work as keyboard shortcuts, zooming text size up and down. This feature works in Camino, Firefox and Internet Explorer as well.

This does not increase the size of images in your browser, however. For this feature you must be running OS X 10.2 or later.

OS X will let you zoom the whole screen, using Quartz to smooth the screen and avoid pixelation. The default key command for this feature (once it's turned on in the Universal Access preference pane) is command-option-equals to zoom in, with command-option-minus doing the reverse.

If you set it to an easier key combination (such as F5 and F6, only possible with OS X 10.3 or higher through the Keyboard Shortcuts tab of the 'Keyboard & Mouse' System Preference pane), you'll find that you use it more often, and that it's quite a nice feature, both for your own use and when using your screen to show things to others.