Setting a minimum HTML font size
I have written before about the eye-bending frustration of small font sizes in
Usually these are
The tips I blogged before about turning
You can view the plain text version using the
keyboard shortcut “Command-Option-P”, or toggle through the available formats using “Command-]” and “Command-[".
But here's another work around if small font sizes bug you too. It adds a new key to your com.apple.mail.plist file that will govern the size of HTML text.
1. Quit Mail
2. Open the Terminal and type in the following:
3. Restart
Of course you can set the point size to whatever you like.
[Via comments on this post at macOSXHints.]
Tags: Apple Mail, HTML, html emails, keyboard shortcut, mail.appRelated posts
October 30th, 2005 at 1:55 pm
Great tip…and it actually works…! But now my signatures — which are in 12 pt. Verdana — seem to be blown up to 16 pt. or so…!?! And the font size can’t be altered anymore, it seems…!?!
It does still say that it is “Verdana 12 pt.” but it’s being displayed much bigger…!
Any suggestions how to get that fixed…?!
October 30th, 2005 at 2:03 pm
Okay, my mistake…! Actually my sigs used to be 10 pt. and now they are 12, which just looks huge…! ;-)
I just hadn’t expected the hack to work for the signatures as well, so I got confused a bit, sorry…! Although it’s pretty obvious that it would alter *all* HTML or RTF content…
October 30th, 2005 at 2:35 pm
Excellent. Nothing like a tip that acutally works! :-)
Of course, this only affects the way that HTML displays on your Mac. The people that you send HTML emails to won’t see a huge sig; it will still look 10 pt to them.
November 17th, 2005 at 1:37 pm
Finally! I’ve been frustrated with this since 10.4 came out. Now everything appears at a reasonable size…
November 20th, 2005 at 3:15 pm
Does this only work with Tiger? I use 10.3.9 and it didn’t work - unless I’m an idiot (which I might be)
November 20th, 2005 at 8:08 pm
Hmmm… I don’t know about Panther. I’m an early adopter type, so I have no Panther machines around to double-check this.
Do other keyboard shortcut workarounds provide you with any relief?
November 21st, 2005 at 4:17 am
well I have gone with customizing toolbar and dragging small A and larger A, seems the most convenient (until I get Tiger for Xmas!)
thanks
May 26th, 2006 at 3:07 pm
I’ve done this trick — with the minimum size.
here’s what happened after:
Even though my default font is set to Arial 11 and my Sig File the same, when I send an email to PC Outlook the message body appears in Times and only the sig file has the right formatting — Arial 11. I cannot figure out how this happened!
January 25th, 2007 at 3:30 am
Thanks for the tip! This has been a great annoyance since I’ve started using Mail.app. Now…if someone can just tell me how to get Mail to delete messages from the server (e.g. Gmail) when I empty them from the trash in Mail - then I’ll really be a happy camper!
June 29th, 2007 at 8:35 am
Thanks, this tip has noticeably lowered my stress level today.
December 27th, 2007 at 10:34 pm
I’m not sure if this is a related question or not…I play cards on yahoo and with my new Mac the type in the yahoo window is incredibly small! I have adjusted the minimum font size on my new MacBook Pro but it doesn’t seem to apply to the yahoo window. Is there any fix?
December 28th, 2007 at 8:34 am
You’re right. This is not a Mail-related problem.
Are you using Safari or Firefox? Drop me an email (address is in the sidebar of the front page — http://www.hawkwings.net/ ).