How to Change Gmail's Font Settings

Emails sent through Gmail don't have to be boring and lifeless. It's easy to format your email to add personality to your communications. You can use a custom font size, pick a new font type, and even change the text background color.

Custom font changes work with all types of messages, whether you're replying, forwarding, or composing a new email. Combine these font changes with a custom email signature, and you have some fancy new approaches to your email communications.

It's easy to change the font, size, and other characteristics of the text in the message as well as new text that you add.

Highlight the text you want to change or set the options before you start typing.

If color is your thing, fill your emails with it. You can assign colors to the text of your email or the background, all from within the formatting bar.

For example, you can make Gmail use a blue background and yellow text. Any new text you add after the colored text appears in the same color scheme until you make a change.

By now, your email is looking decidedly interesting and certainly eye-catching. The formatting bar contains a few more options, mostly related to alignment, that you may want to use.

• Align text: Next to the color icon is the text-alignment button. Text within a Gmail message can be aligned to the left, center, or right using the Align button.
• Ordered and unordered lists: Make lists using the next two buttons in the progression from the left of the formatting bar. Just highlight a section of text and click one of these buttons to apply either bullets or numbers.
• Indent text. Some email programs let you tab over to indent, but that isn't supported in Gmail. Instead, you can use the Indent More and Indent Less buttons to move text in and out of the left side of the page. You can even use it with a list to make sublists.
• Quote: Similar to the indent option is the Quote button that makes selected text stand out from the rest with a little indentation and vertical bar.

You've made a lot of decisions and clicked a lot of buttons to get to this point, but if you aren't happy with the results, you can start over. Gmail has thoughtfully provided a Remove Formatting button. The last button in the formatting bar lets you remove all the custom formatting options you made, converting everything back to plain text. Select your text and click this button to remove the custom color, indentations, font changes, and anything else you added.

Most of these editing tools can be accessed through keyboard shortcuts. Hover the mouse over a button in the formatting bar to see what its shortcut is. For example, to quickly make something bold, highlight it and press Ctrl+B on a PC or Command+B on a Mac or use Ctrl+Shift+7 on a PC or Command+Shift+7 on a Mac to convert text to a numbered list.

If you love the new font changes you make and would like to have Gmail use them as the defaults for every message, edit the text style from the General tab of your email settings.