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	Safari app.		Select Desktop View.		Close-up of view settings.
	Tap gear icon, then select Labs.		Setting menu close-up.		Enable Default Text Styling lab.
	Select text, then choose colour.		Red background colour.		Yahoo! mail view.

Recently, a reader named Amir asked a good question pertaining to email text formatting on the iPad: “How [could one] change the font size and forecolor when writing new emails in iPad?”

I had a ready response for the font size portion of his question, the changing the colour of email text portion of his question was another matter altogether.

And so I began an investigation, quickly determining that the built-in mail app bundled with the iPad doesn’t support colour text and so this led me investigate alternatives starting with Gmail.

The Gmail support page titled Formatting, fonts, and colors provides the answer assuming that Gmail is used as one would use it on a desktop machine with a web-browser such as Chrome, Safari, Firefox or IE. The support page provides a brief explanation of text formatting features available if the Google Labs feature in Gmail called Default Text Styling is enabled.

This of course wouldn’t do much good on an iPad…unless the view mode could be switched from the mobile view that Gmail normally uses by default on the iPad to a desktop view mode. A technique suggested by Glasskeys reader Ilan in the How to create or delete GMail folders on the iPad & iPhone post provides an easy way to do this. His comment briefly explained how one can switch the default view mode in Gmail on the iPad by scrolling to the bottom of the left pane and tapping the “View Gmail in Desktop” link.

Consulting the screenshots above can give you a step-by-step of the entire procedure: Turning on Gmail desktop mode, enabling the Lab option, composing an email with text colour formatting changes, and finally how the email appears whilst reading with another email account such as Yahoo!