: Highly-legible Font options for Living Room Computer? I recently had the good fortune to inherit a very small form factor computer (Mac Mini). I've hooked it up to the TV in our living room

@Cooney243

My answer may be less nuanced, but I've always found "Impact" or a simple "Arial Bold" to be great for "long distance" reading. Mostly because they're bulky.

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@Lee3735518

I spent some time on Google looking at options, and learned several things.


Changing the font on Windows 8.1 now requires a registry edit. Look in the HKEY_LocalMachineSoftwareMicrosoftWindows NTCurrentVersonFontSubstitues key, specifically MS Shell Dlg and MS Shell Dlg 2. This is something that has had easy UI support way back as far as at least Windows 2.0 (yes, before Win3.1), but now requires registry-fu to accomplish.
It's considered better to stick with fonts that are built into your system, rather than installing a font specifically for this purpose, as some restore/recovery tools may remove the font and leave your system in a weird place.
The two font faces I found recommended most often were Verdana and Trebuchet MS.
OS X also requires the Apple-equivalent of a registry edit to change font faces.
Both Mac and PC have free third-party tools available to make this easier, but I'm not inclined to install software to accomplish something I'll do once and forget about.


On the Windows side, I know from prior experience with Verdana, I know that while it may be more readable, it's also just plain bigger than other fonts. (Don't believe me? Try using it to make your next term paper bigger seem longer and be amazed). As I had already set the font size as high as I felt comfortable doing without breaking UIs that only allowed specific pixel sizes for text, I didn't want to go with a bigger font face. Therefore, my choice in Windows was Trebuchet MS.

I'm less-well versed on Macs, such that I'm not as comfortable yet making that kind of change: I don't know how to recover if I screw something up so that there is no font to render, I don't know quickly which fonts are available. Apple also tends to care a little more about font selection in the first place, such that there's likely less improvement to be had, and they have keyboard shortcuts built in for zooming. So at least at the moment, the OS X side of the machine still has the default font face. I probably will make a change, because after some practice using the zoom shortcuts I'm not loving the solution. I might use Verdana here, simply because I'm confident it's available.

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