Improving Safari Usefulness

Read more about Safari Beta. Here's David Passell's report: "In using Safari I noticed the absence of any buttons on the tool bar to increase or decrease the size of the web page. I researched a little and found that it has to be installed. While Safari 4 is displayed, click on View and then Customize Tool bar. The size button looks like this:

"There are a lot of other buttons there that you can also drag for other functions.

"You are instructed to drag the button to the Toolbar. You can drag it anywhere you want. I dragged it near the left side, and it looks like the following. (I don't know why designers don't make things look the same from one appearance to the next, but I quibble:))

"Now when you are viewing a web page, you can click on the big A or little A to change the size of the text and images. One good feature of Safari 4 is that both are changed. Other browser size bars often change only the text and leave the images untouched. Also they may garble the page.

"Now there is a 'gotcha' here. Some websites (for example with a newsletter) may link to a PDF file. If you click on this link, it is displayed on your page. There is apparently a PDF plug-in that is part of Safari. You may see a hand on your screen.

"Sometimes the text appears impossibly small to read. So you try to click on big A. Nothing happens, but don't give up. Right click your mouse and you will see the following. You only see this menu if you are looking at a PDF file.

"You now have some choices, and the choice you make is 'Marquee Zoom.' This will cause a + sign in a small circle to display. Hover your mouse over the page and click the mouse. The page(s) will increase in size. You can keep doing this and now it is too large (:.

"What to do?: Hold down the OPTion key and the + changes to a -. Now click away till it is the size you want.

"When you are through sizing the page, you can right click to get the whatchamacallit again. (I think its official name is 'context menu'). To eliminate the + button, you can click on Hand Tool (which will put a hand on the screen). Or click on Select Tool and there will be no special cursor there.

"Note that there are other choices available. Page Display Preferences gives you another menu which controls how the document is displayed. Single Page Continuous is a good choice.

"Hope this helps in making your use of Safari 4 even more enjoyable." Regards: David