Can I zoom text size on the iPad in Safari? It's easy enough to zoom in on a page with the pinch gesture and on most websites it works well to zoom in past the navigation and ads to make the text big enough to read but some sites don't have all that left and right margin area and I want to be able to zoom the text and have it reformat it to fit my screen like Android does. Is that possible? Is there some magic gesture I'm missing like three finger zoom scroll or two hand double finger split scroll?
You can double-tap to zoom in to a section. I find this feature very useful. As you use it you'll soon learn where to double-tap to get the zoomed-in view you want.

Safari does not have support for changing just the font size without zooming the page, but Opera Mini does have that feature. You can go to settings and choose from small, medium or large font sizes.

But note that this only works on some websites, not all. This is because changing font size can very likely break the website design/layout. Website creators like to control the user experience so they explicitly set the font size so the browsers can't change it.