Using mathematical expressions to scale text proportionally in Mac OS X

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“.

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1. What the font?
2. Using Mac OS X Finder Droplets to quickly launch text editors
3. Using Regular Expressions – Part 3 of 3 – Examples
4. Using Regular Expressions – Part 1 of 3 – Overview
5. Using Regular Expressions – Part 2 of 3 – Regex in PHP