The font size in the inspector (e.g. Annotations when looking at highlighted text) is awfully small on my screen. I see options in preferences to tweak the size in the text and sidebar but not for the inspectors. Is this correct ? It would certainly help my tired eyes if it could be set by the user.
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This isn’t customizable but we’ll consider this for future releases.
Chiming in to belatedly add a plug for the option to increase inspector font size in future versions. I am finally updating my workflow to better use DT3’s annotation functions rather than recreate the old DT2 templates with hyperlinks. Having the single split window to view a document + inspector is great, but it’s very rough on the eyes. I know a pop-out annotation fixes this, but it sort of defeats the purpose of streamlining. Showing the difference between my ideal text size and inspector size in the screenshot. I’m not visually impaired, but I imagine all DT3 users could benefit from a feature that would improve accessibility. Crossing fingers it might be feasible in the future! Thanks for considering.
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+1
My eyes would really appreciate this. I think it should receive a high priority as it could be considered an accessibility issue.
Changing the font in the UI is no trivial matter, especially considering things like user-defined custom metadata fields. It would very easy to break the interface if we just let people change the UI font sizes.
Also note, the operating system has long included Accessibility features to address many issues. This would include their Zoom features.
Thanks! I realized I can also change the font size of my annotations by highlighting and right clicking in the inspector. This makes them rather large if you look at them as stand alone annotation files, but if you’re working in inspector, it seems like a good solution to this dilemma.
The Annotations and Attachments inspectors will use the view font (see Preferences > General > Appearance) in the next release.
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The View Text Size option doesn’t changes the font size of annotations in the Annotations & Reminders inspector.
One would have to change the annotation font size to something like 18pt or larger to have a decent reading in the inspector.
But then how to deal with the stand alone annotations with that large font size?
As far as I understand, the UI decreases the font size of annotation files when displayed in the Annotations & Reminders inspector. I guess if it didn’t reduce the font size or having the ability to increase/decrease using an inputed percentage would solve this issue.
The inspector displays the actual font size of the annotation file. (For RTFs the font size can vary across documents. For markdown your plain text font is used)
Files viewed in document windows and the view/edit pane have a zoom level independent of the actual font size. It sounds like you have zoomed in at some point and now think the zoomed state is the baseline. If you open an annotation in a separate window and reset the zoom (View > Zoom > Actual Size) it should be the same as in the inspector.
Ok troejgaard, you’re right about the fact that I have zoomed in the RTFs window. If I reset de zoom level it becomes almost unreadable on my 3440x1440px monitor.
With that said, a zoom state in the Annotations & Reminders inspector should be possible. Working with RTFs with 18 ou 24pt font size to fix this issue doesn’t seem to be a good idea.
What font size are you using?
Why not?
Because then, when I print or export to PDF, I’ll get a document with a huge font size…
(I’m using the default font size for RTFs - Times New Roman 12pt)
Well, I almost never print anything anymore 
My only use of RTF at this point is annotation files, and I never print or convert those to PDF.
How often do you do either? Unless it’s very often, it doesn’t seem like much trouble to quickly adjust the font size before printing/converting.
Or perhaps use print scaling? I don’t have much experience with printing RTF, but from some quick testing that seems to work okay. File > Page Setup, scale down depending on your font size and taste. Enable “Rewrap contents to fit page” in the print dialog. Both settings are also used for converting to PDF (paginated).
The page margins might not be what you want, though… The result seems better if you open in Pages and scale down in File > Page Setup there.
If you only print RTF files that are not annotations, you could just create an annotation template using a bigger font size than your default.
I mainly use markdown. My custom stylesheet has some printing rules that set the font size for printing/PDF, so the font size I use on screen doesn’t matter.
Ok, the print scaling seems like a good option to explore.
Can you please share the printing rules you use to set the font size for printing/PDF? Does it only applies to markdown files?
And finally do you know a way (a script maybe) to select all RTF annotations files and change the font size in bulk?
Thanks.
It only applies to markdown.
The Rich Text Format (.rtf) stores all information about the document appearance in the file itself. That’s the “rich” part. Markdown is just plain text. It’s essentially an easy way to write simple HTML and keep the raw text more readable.
HTML is also just plain text. It gives a document semantic structure: this is a paragraph, a level 1 heading, level 2 heading, blockquote, etc. The rendering of HTML is controlled by a CSS style sheet. Because of that it’s easy to make sweeping changes to the appearance of documents. That’s one of the benefits of markdown.
From what I understand RTF doesn’t have any underlying semantic information, which makes it a pain to make bulk changes to styling across files. I never used RTF much, so I can’t help you there. I think you can do some things with scripting, but that’s outside my expertise. If you search the forum I think you’ll find something.
There’s a nice introduction to CSS for markdown here on the forum:
The last part of the series is about printing styles.
As long as all your styling use relative units for font-size, setting the base font size for printing with an absolute unit is easy enough:
@media print {
body {
font-size: 16px;
}
}
(16px fits my taste. I always found 12pt too small for printing my own documents. Maybe you’ll like 12px or 14px)
But: You only see the raw markdown in the annotation inspector. That’s why I often prefer RTF here, it keeps links more tidy.
almost unreadable on my 3440x1440px monitor.
You know, you could always lower the monitor resolution.
And finally do you know a way (a script maybe) to select all RTF annotations files and change the font size in bulk?
Change it to what?
ChatGPT delivered me a script for that change. As long as I don’t have different font sizes in the same document, it works fine:
tell application "DEVONthink 3"
-- Get the desired font
set fontDialog to display dialog "Enter the desired font name:" default answer "Times"
set fontName to text returned of fontDialog
-- Get the desired size
set sizeDialog to display dialog "Enter the desired font size:" default answer "18"
set fontSize to text returned of sizeDialog
-- Try to convert the size to a number
try
set fontSize to fontSize as integer
on error
display alert "Error" message "Font size must be a valid number."
return
end try
-- Get selected documents
set selectedDocs to selection
if selectedDocs is {} then
display alert "No document selected!" message "Please select at least one RTF document."
else
repeat with aDoc in selectedDocs
if (type of aDoc as string) is "rtf" then
tell text of aDoc
set its font to fontName
set its size to fontSize
end tell
end if
end repeat
display alert "Process completed!" message "RTF files have been formatted with the font '" & fontName & "' and size " & (fontSize as string) & "."
end if
end tell