MacBook – Small font size with 1440p external monitor

displayfontmacbook pro

I've connected 27" Dell U2715H to MacBook pro 2012 and have a default resolution 2560×1440. It looks nice but the font size is waaaay too small, so I had to lose some of this niceness by scaling down to 2048×1152.

I wonder is this a usual thing people do? I know this kind of displays (27" 1440p) are popular as an external MacBook monitors. As far as I know, it's not possible to change the global font size. I can't imagine how people go along with this tiny text by default with 1440p.

UPDATE:

a good question came up in comments about what do I consider a tiny font size, it's a good point, here's how it looks (full screen snapshots):

  1. Default 2560×1440: https://i.imgur.com/HWz3N14.png
  2. Scaled down 2048×1152: https://i.imgur.com/neyt4r1.png

My eyesight isn't perfect so I asked my colleague who wears glasses to take a look at it, he confirmed that it does look tiny

Best Answer

In my experience if you connect your monitor via HDMI it won't give the the font scaling options in System Preferences > Displays.

If however you connect via DisplayPort i.e. Mini DisplayPort to DisplayPort it should give you the options similar to these:

enter image description here

There used to be some hacks to trick the monitor into switching into HiDPI mode but I couldn't personally get these to work on macOS High Sierra, but using a DisplayPort cable rather than either HDMI or Mini DisplayPort to HDMI did resolve the issue.

Related Question