Enlarge font in Reading Pane

Using a high resolution has the benefit of a sharper display which is more relaxed for your eyes. The downside of this is that your font might become really small and hard to read which is anything but relaxed for your eyes.

There are several ways to enlarge the font in the Reading Pane in Outlook;

• You can use CTRL+Mouse Scroll in the Reading Pane to zoom in and out per message. Depending on your mouse/scroll sensitivity you might need to scroll quite a bit before the font size will change.
• For Plain Text you can modify the display font in Tools-> Options-> tab Mail Format-> Stationery and Fonts (or just Fonts… in previous versions of Outlook)
• Another way to go for HTML formatted emails would be to set the option to read all mail in Plain Text so that your modified Plain Text font settings will always apply. Via the Infobar, which will display on top of a converted message, you can easily change it back to HTML format when needed (like for some special layout or newsletters).
  • For Outlook 2007;
    Tools-> Trust Center…-> E-mail Security-> Read all standard mail in plain text
  • For Outlook 2003
    Tools-> Options…-> button Email Options…-> Read all standard mail in plain text
  • For Outlook 2002 follow the instructions here.

If font sizes is a general issue throughout Outlook, Windows and other applications, you might want to consider customizing the DPI settings in Windows instead. To do this;

Windows Vista

1. Right click on an empty spot on your Desktop and choose Personalize
2. In the left pane called Tasks there is a task called Adjust font size (DPI). The shield in front of it indicates that you’re going to make a change that affects all users that will log on to this computer. If that’s ok by you, click the "Adjust font size (DPI)" link and press Continue or provide Administrator credentials to confirm making a system wide change.
3. In the new dialog that popped up you can directly choose "Larger scale (120 DPI)…" to make the fonts bigger. If you prefer a different font size you can click on "Custom DPI…” and type any percentage you like.

Windows XP

1. Right click on an empty spot on your Desktop and choose Properties
2. Select the Settings tab and click the button Advanced
3. In the new dialog that popped up you can directly choose "Larger scale (120 DPI)…" in the dropdown list to make the fonts bigger. If you prefer a different font size you can select "Custom DPI…” and type any percentage you like.

Note 1: You can actually TYPE a percentage; you don’t have to use the predefined values in the dropdown list.

Note 2: In Windows Vista, if you have the issue that some text will fall out of dialogs after increasing the DPI settings you can press the "Custom DPI…" button and deselect the option "Use Windows XP style DPI scaling". This does some pretty nifty dialog re-rendering but I won’t bore you with technical details on that