Have you tried Firefox's zoom feature? Font size and zoom - increase the size of web pages You can "zoom" all sites using this add-on: NoSquint. After setting your global zoom level, you can still fine-tune the zoom on individual sites. After installing NoSquint, click the % on the Add-on Bar to call up site preferences, then click the Global Settings button, then the Zooming tab.

If you don't have the Add-on Bar displayed, you can right-click the new tab button ("+") or a blank area of the tab bar to the right of it and choose Add-on Bar from the shortcut menu.

You can experiment with sizes larger than 125%, but I wouldn't go much higher than 150% unless you have a large high-resolution monitor.

If there are particular sites that still present a problem, feel free to post their URLs.

You can find more information about the zoom features Firefox offers in these articles:

Text zoom - For zooming text only

Page zoom - For zooming the whole page (including images etc.)

You can use an extension to set a default font size and page zoom on web pages.

• Default FullZoom Level: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/default-fullzoom-level/
• NoSquint: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/nosquint/

The zooming sounds helpful, but actually isn't.

If I zoom on each page, it only helps that page. Doing that for every page I visit gets old fast. I can set a minimum font size but that seems to break a lot of pages - objects overlap etc. Unsuprisingly, the same thing happens if I zoom fonts only.

This page is a good example of a poor layout. It has a huge variation in font sizes - 'Support Forum' is probably 6 x the height of the content text, which itself has poor contrast. Oddly, I think the content text grew when I logged in. A factor of 2 would be far more reasonable, providing adequate demarcation without wasting half the page on headings.

The text boxes are also too narrow, failing to grow in proportion with the page if I resize it wider and instead providing huge, useless margins.

You can set a minimum zoom value in the extension.

• http://kb.mozillazine.org/Zoom_text_of_web_pages
• http://kb.mozillazine.org/browser.zoom.full
• http://kb.mozillazine.org/browser.zoom.siteSpecific

• http://kb.mozillazine.org/toolkit.zoomManager.zoomValues

• http://kb.mozillazine.org/zoom.minPercent
• http://kb.mozillazine.org/zoom.maxPercent

May be default font size as set in Options -> Content

thanks, cor-el seems to be making an effort to sort all my problems out at once :)

Default font size definitely seems to be an important factor. I'm finding that there are relatively few working values : e.g it's tiny at serif-16 or below but suddenly changes to huge above that.

I'm lost in a twisty-turny maze of font settings ..

Is there a way to set everything back to 'sane' ?

For me anything other than Arial 16 caused problems. Also had the 'Helvetica Neue' problem, so I uninstalled that font. Sorted a lot of problems.

It's no wonder I'm getting confused - it seems the font size isn't consistent.

I had adjusted default and minimum sizes and was getting mostly readable results (with occasional pages of rather small text). I had a page displayed from ebay, and moved to the login page. All the text was displayed in a very large font, enough to push headings onto multiple lines. I reloaded the page and it displayed normally. I didn't change to any other page inbetween.

What can I do to debug this ?

A good place to start is an add-on called Font Information that allows you to select text and check the font size and type.

I've found 'context font' - is that it ? 'font information' doesn't appear as an add-on in the search, but maybe hasn't been updated to current firefox version.

However, while that would be helpful, I think i'd also need to know why a particular font was selected - because the page required it, or the style, or a default, or it was a substitution etc. Is that information available ?

i have it on ff19.

You'll need to check the .html or .css of the specific sites in question. Right-click view page source. Happy hunting.