I've used KDE for years, but suddenly my eyesight has gotten so bad I need a hand magnifier to read ordinary text on the screen.

Can you recommend the settings that will give me larger text with good contrast? I'm thinking some themes might be better than others for this.

I increased the font size in Application Appearance, but that only enlarges the text in the title bars.

Lane

Did you increase the size of all fonts in the Fonts settings? The should increase all font sizes in KDE applications. You may have to restart the applications for the effect to take place.

Notice that those settings won't affect eg. firefox or other gtk+ based applications.

Something else you might want to try is scale & pan:

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xrandr --output `xrandr -q | grep primary | cut -d ' ' -f1` --scale 0.5x0.5 --panning 1920x1200


This will (well, "should") zoom the screen in by factor 2 and provide a viewport of 1920x1200px (assuming this is your native resolution and you want to keep that) that will always show the quarter of your screen where the mouse is.
Ie. you'll get bigger contents with half resolution, but only a part of the screen visiable at a time.

Unlike the zoom effect in kwin, this does not require any compositing.
It *might* perform better than the zoom effect, but as well *might* collide with compositing (or other OpenGL aplications) on the driver level.

To resetthis, call

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xrandr --output `xrandr -q | grep primary | cut -d ' ' -f1` --scale 1x1 --panning 1920x1200


Of course you can choose any other factor than 0.5 (values < 1 will scale up, > 1 will scale down. You want to scale x and y by the same amout), the panning parameter should be the actual screen resolution for a scale factor of "1" to prevent any panning.