aaron c beals

i’ve been using Gmail for a while, and have bought completely into their UI (tagging, conversations, search etc). as i mentioned in an earlier post, i even installed Mozilla’s Prism so i could use Gmail as more of a stand-alone app. however, one feature i’ve really missed is the ability to display all non-HTML emails as monospaced (fixed-width font). other mail clients (Outlook, Thunderbird) have this capability, and Gmail even lets you compose emails in a fixed-width font, but doesn’t display them that way as you’re reading them.

why fixed-width fonts? well, for hackers like me, code and “ascii art” display properly in a fixed-width font. fonts like Arial and even Times use different widths for different charaacters, screwing up the original formatting of certain emails. for instance, this:


+ Col1 + Col2 +
---------------
| data | data |
| mmmm | mmmm |
| wwww | wwww |
| oooo | oooo |


ends up rendered like this:

+ Col1 + Col2 +
—————
| data | data |
| mmmm | mmmm |
| wwww | wwww |
| oooo | oooo |

recently, they added a feature through “Gmail Labs” that toggles monospace, but it has to be turned for each and every time you read an email. a global setting would have been much nicer.

so i went searching, and this is what i found:

1) if you use Firefox, just install the “Stylish” extension and add a style for it.
2) if you use Prism, go to the unpacked bundle of the gmail webapp (the one on the Prism site unpacks to a directory called “google.mail@developer.mozilla.org”). in there, create a file called webapp.css (you should see webapp.ini and webapp.js already). add the following to that file:

.geTjV, .ArwC7c, .iE5Yyc, .uQLZXb > textarea {
font-family: courier !important;
font-size: 10pt !important;
}


enjoy.