Wednesday, March 9, 2011

How to change text font size in Microsoft MSDN 2008 Document Explorer

MSDN Library that comes with Visual Studio 2008 shows its content in Microsoft Document Explorer. The Explorer is a index/search engine with embedded Internet Explorer that shows the text.

One annoying thing that I found is the size of the text fonts. They appear really tiny on my Dell 2009W Wide Screen monitor that sports 1680x1050 resolution.

The Font Resize button on Document Explorer's own toolbar has no effect on the text font size. It took me some digging to learn how to control the font size:

  1. Start MSDN Library. Wait for Microsoft Document Explorer to start up.
  2. Click on Tools->Options. The Options dialog comes up. Note that its Environment/'Fonts and Colors' setting has no effect on the size of the text fonts.
  3. Instead, select Help/'Web Browser', and click on 'Internet Explorer Options..." button.
  4. Choose 'General' tab and click on 'Accessibility' button in 'Appearance' section. 
  5. In 'Accessibility' dialog that pops up under 'Formatting' section enable:
    • Ignore font styles specified on webpage
    • Ignore font sizes specified on webpage 
  6. Confirm to all the changes

This should effectively change the size of the text fonts in the Document Explorer.