Reading posts in Zoomers

If you're reading a post in zoomers, you may get tired of having to pan horizontally using a mouse or trackball. Here are a couple of alternatives.

First resize the width of the Internet Explorer window so that it's about a third of the width of the screen. Its easier to do this if you temporarily reduce the magnification. Then the width of the post should fit within the screen, and you can scroll vertically using the mouse scroll wheel ( or trackball equivalent ). Note that you can adjust the rate of scrolling on the Wheel tab on the Mouse Properties dialog ( which you get by double clicking on Mouse in the Control Panel ).

This paragraph shows what it looks like if the width of the post is restricted to one quarter of the screen width. With your magnification set to 4, the width should just fill the width of the screen. Is this more readable?

The second way is to use the panning and moving provided by your screen magnifier. You'll be using the arrow keys and the home key, and its easier to use the numerical key pad for these with num lock off. Start holding down the ALT key ( or for magicians, the MAGIC key ). To pan to the right press RIGHT ARROW - pressing it again increases the rate of panning, and to slow down press LEFT ARROW. When you get to the end of the line, and preferably before you hit the edge of the window, press the HOME key. This moves you to the left edge of the window, after which you'll continue panning to the right, and you can read the next line. After about four lines you'll reach the bottom of the window. Let go of the ALT or MAGIC key, and using the mouse scroll wheel, scroll down about four lines, and start panning again.

Finally for those using Zoomtext, the DocReader feature should be useful, but it doesn't seem to work very well on web pages - I'll try and find out more about this.