Utility for converting printouts to a large font

Question

My grandmother would like to be able to print articles from the web in large type, so that any visually impaired people she distributes the printouts to will have a better chance at reading them. She uses IE7 on Windows XP.

Sure, she could copy the text of the article to a document, set the font size as high as she likes, and print the document, but I'm hoping to find a tool that allows for a more streamlined process.

IE7's Page Setup allows you to select a font size, but it only allows up to 14-point. My grandmother would like to be able to do larger type.

What I'm looking for is basically a printing equivalent of a Readability bookmark. Readability itself doesn't seem to do this. No matter what size text Readability displays on the screen, it always prints out with the same font size.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

I'm a "Granny" and I print pages quite often, several every day, and most from IE8. Using "PrintWhatYouLike" was so confusing, sorry, but I found that if you right-click the page and select Print Preview, there is a box at the top that says "Shrink to fit." Click that box and you'll see that you have the option to adjust the view on the page up to whatever percentage you want. This enlarges the text, but also may be too much to fit on the page, so you may have to adjust margins of the pages, or select text to print and make sure it fits.

Answer 2

Some browsers allow you change the scale of the page before printing. For example, Opera's Print Options allow you to change the Zoom value from 100% to something else. You could set this to 150% to make prints automatically zoom the pages by 150% when printing.

Also, Opera supports the Zoom function when viewing websites, you can even change the default zoom from 100% to something like 150% or 200%. That will automatically scale up websites to larger fonts while maintaining the site's layout.

Answer 3

You could display the font of the web pages to be bigger, then print from there. Go to:

View -> Text Size -> Largest

Makes the page and printouts noticeably larger.

Answer 4

I just found PrintWhatYouLike.com, which provides a handy tool for this purpose. For some reason, the tool seems to have no effect on the text of an NYTimes story, although I can adjust the text size on other websites.

Answer 5

Firefox allows you to set the font size higher than IE7. Just get her to download it, set up the font size for her under options, and not only have you solved the problem, your grandmother is now using a safer browser. Plus, the Firefox interface is much easier to use and customize. If your grandmother doesn't want to switch browsers, just use PrintWhatYouLike.com. Maybe IE8 has larger fonts, and she could probably upgrade to that if she likes IE7, the change is not that big. Or yet another option is go to Internet Options > General > Fonts and select a larger font while at the same time making the text size the largest.