Reading Mathematica journal online, how to download CDF and/or increase font size?

Question

I have a hard time reading the Mathematica journal online, since the fonts are too small, and I'm not able to download the CDF files.

When I go to mathematicajournal.com and click on CDF, it opens inside the browser. But the "increase font size" option I have on my Firefox has no effect on the size of the fonts used by the CDF. So it stays too small for me.

I can't download the CDF, since when I right-click on the 'cdf' link, I do not get an option to download the target as normally I do with other files. It only opens in the browser, and once it does, I do not see how to download it or change the font size.

Maybe someone here knows how to either increase the font size while in the browser, or download it. (Once I download it, I can open it in Mathematica, then I can increase the zoom there to see it better).

Answer 1

Both pinch zooming and ctrl-scroll work for me on FireFox, ctrl-plus doesn't:

Answer 2

So you need to change the Notebook or $FrontEnd option Magnification, but (as far as I can tell) you can't do that from within the Wolfram CDF player or CDF browser plugin.

The standard init.m files work for the cdf reader, but do not work with the plugin. However, there is an init file used by the plugin. In my WinXP test install (because there's no plugin for linux yet...) the file that you want is C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\MathematicaPlayer\Autoload\PacletManager\Configuration\FrontEnd\init_8.0.3.0.m Where the numbers will change as the version changes. There is no file in the C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\ version of the directory structure... but maybe it would work if you created one.

Anyway, in the default install, my file contained

SetOptions[$FrontEndSession,
PrivatePaths -> {"SystemResources" -> {ParentList}, 
  "TextResources" -> {FrontEnd`FileName[{"C:\\Program Files\\Wolfram \
Research\\Wolfram CDF \
Player\\8.0\\AddOns\\Applications\\WolframAlphaClient\\.\\FrontEnd", 
      "TextResources"}, "PacletManager" -> True, "Prepend" -> True], 
    ParentList}}
]

Just add the Magnification that you want to the SetOptions and save, e.g.

SetOptions[$FrontEndSession,
PrivatePaths -> {"SystemResources" -> {ParentList}, 
  "TextResources" -> {FrontEnd`FileName[{"C:\\Program Files\\Wolfram \
Research\\Wolfram CDF \
Player\\8.0\\AddOns\\Applications\\WolframAlphaClient\\.\\FrontEnd", 
      "TextResources"}, "PacletManager" -> True, "Prepend" -> True], 
    ParentList}},
Magnification->1.5
]

Then restart the cdf plugin and reload the cdf document that you want.

Answer 3

Update to Simon's answer for Windows 8/7/Vista:

The location of the plugin initialization file for the stand-alone player is

C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\MathematicaPlayer\Autoload\PacletManager\Configuration\FrontEnd\init_VERSION.m

and the location for the player installed along with Mathematica is

C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Mathematica\Autoload\PacletManager\Configuration\FrontEnd\init_VERSION.m

The apparent size of the player is controlled by adding the line

Magnification->1.5

with a comma either before or after to separate it from the other options. In practice the number used should be less than the actual Windows desktop magnification to avoid clipping of the displayed image by the embedding area.

These files get overwritten when the plugin exits naturally. This can be prevented by making the files read-only after editing, with no apparent error messages or problems.