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Change Quick Look font for text docs

Is there a way to change the default font and size for text-like documents in Quick Look? I've gone through many pages of search results in lots of places to no avail. Thanks.

MBP, 2.2 GHz, 2 GB, Mac OS X (10.5.2)

Posted on Mar 2, 2008 9:37 PM

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7 replies

Mar 3, 2008 4:56 PM in response to Bryan M

I suspect this is controlled by the 'Quick Look generator' at path/System/Library/Frameworks/QuickLook.framework/Versions/A/Resources/Generat ors/Text.qlgenerator.

I don't believe that the defaults are in a plist anywhere but in the code of the "qlgenerator," meaning you would have to modify the code itself. There is considerable info about writing third party qlgenerators in the developer docs, but I have no real idea if rewriting the code for a different font is practical or easy.

Mar 3, 2008 7:43 PM in response to Bryan M

My understanding is that QuickLook is controlled by the program the file would normally open in, ie for plain text it would be TextEdit. I would try opening TextEdit preferences and changing the default font for plain text documents to something other than Monaco 10p and see whether that fixes it. What I am not sure is whether that default font will reassign to any document you have already Quick Looked? I take it you are in the habit of Quick Looking plain text documents that you never actually open?

Mar 3, 2008 11:22 PM in response to Jeremy P

Afraid that won't work. My preferred font for plain text is Geneva 12, which I have set as the default in TextEdit. When I open something in TextEdit that is what appears. I also use another text editor frequently, which is also set to Geneva 12 as its defaults. Text documents from either program appear as Monaco 10 when looked at with Quicklook. I took a look inside the Text.qlgenerator and opened the Info.plist with Property List Editor. Unfortunately there was no sign of a font or weight specification, so it looks like R C-R is indeed correct, and it is hard coded into the binary.
Francine

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Francine
Schwieder

Mar 4, 2008 1:12 AM in response to Francine Schwieder

Francine Schwieder wrote:
I took a look inside the Text.qlgenerator and opened the Info.plist with Property List Editor. Unfortunately there was no sign of a font or weight specification ...


I've also opened the resource file (its an XML file) & don't see anything promising there either -- although there are entries for weight, they do not seem to apply to font weight, & there is nothing involving font names at all.

Change Quick Look font for text docs

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