If You Have Any Users With 1 Inch Thick Glasses …
 

You might want to continue reading… because a few days ago, I was called in to help an employee (who had been recently upgraded) with a strange predicament.
 

Basically speaking, after his Lotus Notes R8.5.1 upgrade, his fonts in Lotus Notes were so incredibily HUGE that I could probably have read his emails from across the room.
 

Why did this happen? I wasn’t sure and the answer surprised me … Let’s see what was going on …
 

Lesson 1: Lotus Notes R8.5.1 Now “Obeys” the Windows Fonts Size Settings
 

It appears to me that Lotus has made an incredible effort to make the Lotus Notes R8.5.1 client much better for people with vision related troubles. For example, if you set your Windows Fonts settings to use “Large Fonts”, or “Extra Large Fonts” then the Lotus Notes R8.5.1 client will kindly “adapt” itself and display everything using a bit (or a lot) bigger font.
 

And because of this, I tip my hat to thee oh Lords of the Yellowverse for being so kind toward people with vision troubles. As jet fighters say “loose the sight, loose the fight” but in reality, if you’re loosing your eyesight, you’re loosing a lot more than just a fight!
 

So it’s a really nice touch because the R7 client completly ignored those settings (like a total douche— if you ask me).
 

With this said, his Lotus Notes client displayed fonts a bit bigger but that wasn’t the real reason why his fonts were amazingly HUGE.
 

Lesson 2: Lotus Notes R8.5.1 Now Has a Font Size Option!
 

If you have explored a bit the File → Preferences menu, you might have seen that there is now a “Font size” selection box under “Fonts and Colors”.
 

With the help of this option, you can make the fonts even larger. However, it was not the case for that particular employee since his font size option was set to “Normal” like in the example above.
 

Once again, I feel obliged to tip my hat to the Lords of the Yellowverse for adding this option. I am not 100% sure why I would use it since the client now obeys the Windows Font Size selection but there must be someone out there who needs it (or who does not want to increase his Windows Font size but who really does want to only increase his Lotus Notes Font Size).
 

So, what was really going on?
 

The Culprit: An Old Notes.Ini Setting …
 

It suddently dawned on me that I had helped configure the Lotus Notes version 6 or 7 of that particular employee about 5 years ago (maybe more). And back then, the only way to get Lotus Notes to increase the font size it was using was to tweak the notes.ini file.
 

So, I opened his notes.ini and found this line which I promtly removed:
 

Display_font_adjustment=3
 

After removing that line, saving the notes.ini file, closing Lotus Notes and re-opening it: everything was back to “normal”: his fonts were bigger because of the Windows Font settings but not amazingly HUGE anymore.
 

Conclusion (?)
 

Well, this might help someone out there so I figure it might be good to blog about it … but in the meantime, we all should give a big “Thanks!” to the programmers at Lotus who made the client now “see” the Windows Font size and obey it (also for adding the Font size option inside the client itself).
 

Thanks for reading!
 

Marc