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Monday, November 13, 2006

How to Increase the Gmail Font Size

I always found Gmail’s font size for mails a bit too small for comfortable reading – and since I read a lot in Gmail, I wanted to optimize it. While I can adjust the font size in Firefox using View -> Text size -> Increase, I don’t like to change all web pages. If you also want to increase the Gmail font size in Firefox, here’s how you can achieve it:

  1. Locate your Firefox profile folder. On Windows XP, it should be somewhere here*:
    C:\Documents and Settings[your user name]\ Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\ [some folder name]chrome
  2. Open the file userContent.css with a text editor.
  3. Copy & paste the following lines into the file (which is probably empty):
    .cbl .mb { font-size: 95% !important; }
    td textarea.tb { font-size: 120% !important; }
  4. Restart Firefox... mails – the actual message content, and your replies as you prepare them in the text box – should now show in a font closer to your browser’s default font size.

Basically what you did is add a line to the user stylesheet which overrides some CSS classes Google defined for Gmail. (Since Gmail might change their class names, a more long-lived solution may be crafted by installing the URLid extension.) Navigation items such as labels or anything else keep their old font size, though with a bit of tweaking you can change almost anything... including the actual font used, colors, and so on.

*You may need to use your local folder names if you run a non-English OS. Also see information on finding the profile folder on other systems.



