You can create and apply a quick style (see manual or online help) that stores a set of font and colour combinations that you can apply to a single item or set of items. This is an easy way to quickly change to a smaller font when certain items dont work well with your default font (e.g., when using horizontal scale responses).

Alternate solution.. Since MediaLab v2006 now supports html forms, you could design your question using a standard HTML survey form with any program you like. If you want to do that you can design it to look however you want and I'll show you how to have MediaLab present it in your questionnaire and save the data automatically in the SPSS and Excel data files.