In general people would like the ability to change fonts wherever they see them, this is not possible, and there are many interactions between settings in Quicken and in their operating system that can cause users problems and not allow them to achieve the desired results. This FAQ addresses the reasons, the current status, and possible workarounds. I will try first put in some history, and then try to address each common problem.
• Quicken Windows discussion, For Quicken Essentials for Mac you only can change size of fonts by changing the screen resolution.
• If you are using Quicken Windows with a retina screen in Parallels or any other Virtual Machine on a Mac see the "Mac" answer below for a possible solution for you.
• If you are using a high resolution screen and a large screen the last answer might help you.
Quicken has gone through many different GUI styles and many versions of operating systems. When a new operating system or style of GUI is created all of Quicken is not rewritten to make Quicken consistent with it (that is just not possible given the cost and time not to mention bugs it would take).
The result is for better or worse Quicken is a patch work of these things and as such some things that seem easy to the customer, like having control over all the fonts in the program and having them consistent is actually very difficult. A special case should also be pointed out and that is the regular register and what Quicken calls the Investment transaction list (investment register). These two have had a long history of being developed pretty much as separate things. They may look similar, but at the core they are very different as can be seen in the way you can (or can’t) change fonts and columns and such.
People using the Windows DPI scaling to make everything larger tend to say something to the effect that why does such a simple thing like making everything larger mess up things in Quicken. The truth is that over the different versions of Windows Microsoft has actually done different things for this, and they have never in the core provided the programmer a simple solution. There is a lot of work to make this look right, and when you add in the fact that Quicken is a mix of GUI styles it has been next to impossible for Intuit make this work/look right in Quicken. There have been several attempts that never made it out of Beta to get Quicken to work right with a DPI scaling of something other than 100%/smaller/normal (different operating systems have different names for this). See this link for information about this problem, and see that Quicken is not the only program that this has been a problem for:
http://www.kynosarges.org/WindowsDpi.htmlThe latest attempt by Intuit to fix this problem came out in Quicken 2012, and is also in Quicken 2013, and it is called “Use Large Fonts." The idea here is for Quicken to do the scaling, as in make everything 125% larger. It was done this way for two reasons. The problems described above, and for the complaint “All my other applications are fine, but the print on Quicken is too smallâ€. So by definition for the last complaint they wanted Quicken to do the 125% scaling even when other programs weren’t. Well it turns out that this “internal†scaling had even greater effects on how bad the Windows DPI scaling would “disturb†Quicken’s “lookâ€.
Also it should be noted that there is a secondary problem of people wanting more and more on their screens and having higher resolution screens to support it, and then the people for one reason or another want to run at a lower resolution, and how does the GUI designer construct the GUI in a way that it works for these different groups. No solution is going to be perfect for 100% of the setups out there.
