Changing Gmail font size

Thu, 30 August 2007

I use Gmail and Google Applications for your Domain all the time, and I love it. But one thing I don’t like about it are the fonts and their sizes. So I thought I would change them, but as everyone knows - it can’t be done. At least not through Gmail preferences.

But since Firefox is my default browser, there are a few things I can do. There are quite a few scripts for GreaseMonkey and Stylish to do this, but I really didn’t want to go that way. I wanted something else, something simple, clean, easy.

After some research on the internet and lots of trial and error, I came up with this custom style.

td textarea.tb {
font-family: Verdana !important;
font-size: 13px !important;
}

div.msg div.mb {
font-family: Verdana !important;
font-size: 13px !important;
}

It works great, it changes email font to Verdana 13 pixel, and it does the same when writing an email, whether it’s a new email, reply or forwarded one. All interface fonts will stay untouched.

This is how you can do it. Open your text editor (Text edit on Mac or Notepad on Windows) and paste the style above into the document. Name the document userContent.css and save it into following location:

Mac: ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/xxxxxx.default/Chrome/

Windows: C:\Documents and settings\<your_user_name>\Application data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxx.fdefault\Chrome\

where xxxxxx.default is your default profile, and instead of xxxxxx you will have randomly generated set of characters, something like 9rytathw or hwa9rc3h …

Now close and reopen Firefox and your fonts will look just the way you wanted.

You can use any fonts you like, but if you’d like to use the one that has more than one word in its name (e.g. Times New Roman or Lucida Grande) you need to enclose this into inverted comas

font-family: “Times New Roman” !important;

Downside of this is that you may come across a website that has similar styles and this may affect it. But hey, it may even look better.

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Posted in Internet, Software