Amongst its many other features, Mac OS X’s standard Fonts window for Cocoa-based applications allows users to scale document fonts proportionally using mathematical expressions.

What this means is that if you wanted to scale the font sizes in a document containing several different sizes of text, you wouldn’t need to scale sections individually. For example, if you had a document with three sentences in font sizes 14pt, 18pt, and 24pt:

…you could highlight all the text and enter “*1.14” in the Font window’s Size box:

…to scale all the font sizes to 16pt, 20.5pt and 27.4pt at the same time:

Accepted expressions include multiplication, duplication, subtraction and addition, so if you wanted to increase all font sizes by 1pt you could enter “+1“, or if you wanted to half all font sizes you could enter “/2“.

Related posts:

1. What the font?
2. Using Regular Expressions - Part 3 of 3 - Examples
3. Using Mac OS X Finder Droplets to quickly launch text editors
4. Displaying a text-based file and folder tree on the command line
5. Using Regular Expressions - Part 1 of 3 - Overview