Add line space in Gmail messages with a stylesheet in Mailplane

I wrote a while ago about how much I like Mailplane for handling Gmail on my Mac: Mailplane makes Gmail so much smoother.

Mailplane has a nifty slider in the Preferences for making fonts bigger (or smaller) and I’d cranked thing up a bit to make it easier to read.

A message with close together lines.

But something still niggled: when I opened an email message the lines of text were too close together. I needed a way to increase the line-height.

Mailplane accepts CSS files

In Mailplane’s prefs there is a place to choose your own stylesheet. That seemed the obvious way to go with my line-height problem.

I struck an immediate huge glitch though: when I viewed the source of an email message (using another browser) I just couldn’t figure out what selectors to use. All I seemed to be able to do was to make everything in Gmail huge.

A question on the Mailplane mailing list led me to a forum post that led me to a solution.

My Mailplane stylesheet

Larger font and more line-height.

Here’s my new stylesheet, with a better and larger font and more line-height. I hope it’s helpful for other Mailplane users:

textarea.Ak, div.ii.gt {
font-family: Georgia !important;
color:black !important;
font-size: 1em !important;
line-height: 1.5 !important;
}

How to use the code

1. Copy the above code and paste it into a text document.
2. Save the file as mailplane.css. Any filename is fine, so long as it ends in .css.
3. Go to Mailplane Preferences — Tweak UI and check the box beside Custom Stylesheet.
4. Click the Choose button beside the Custom Stylesheet checkbox, locate and Open your stylesheet.

You may need to Quit and restart Mailplane for the changes to take effect.

Now open a plain text message you have received and you should see a difference.

If you receive styled messages their styles may override what you’ve set here.

Be the first to comment ⇒

Tagged as: Email, Gmail, mailplane, styles, text

You may also like -

Mailplane makes Gmail so much smootherMy 5 favourite apps for 20% offQuickly rename batches of files with easeMacTips.infoHow to delete cookies on your iPhone (and why you might want to)MacTips.infoSave a page in Safari to read later on your Mac or iPadMacTips.info