How do I adjust Steam chat font sizes?

It seems that a recent Steam update increased font size in chat to 'improve readability'. Unfortunately, this only changed the font size in the in the conversation area and nowhere else in the chat window, making the interface jarring to use. How can I change it back to the way it was before?

As of May, 6, another Steam update changed the chat input font to about 16 points (screenshot), and there doesn't seem to be a corresponding styles setting to adjust its font size. Is there a way to adjust the friends chat input font size?

You can edit the Steam UI's style files to change font sizes. The files steam.styles and gameoverlay.styles control the look-and-feel of the Steam UI and the overlay UI, respectively. You can locate these by navigating to your Steam folder (usually under Program Files) and navigating into the resource then styles folders.

By finding the lines that contain font-size=, you can change the font size of any UI element.

Specifically, to change the chat font size, find the code blocks that look like this:

friends_chat_text
{
textcolor="text"
selectedtextcolor="TextentrySelected"
SelectedBgColor="focus"
font-size=20
}

And change the font-size to 14 or whatever is comfortable. There are multiple UI types used in Steam Chat, so you will want to inspect and maybe change the font-size in multiple code blocks. The names of the code blocks that are relevant are:

• friends_chat_text
• friends_chat_text_self
• friends_chat_event
• friends_chat_bright_event
• friends_chat_url
• friends_chat_name_ingame
• friends_chat_self
• friends_chat_name
• friends_chat_accountid
• friends_chat_securitylink

You'll have to restart Steam to see the changes.

Be aware that changing these lines is changing the core Steam files, so they'll probably be overwritten when Steam updates. To make these changes stick (and be easier to remove), you might want to look into how to make a Steam skin, and keep your changes in that. (The downside of creating a Steam skin is then you face maintaining it if an update breaks it.)

As of now it is possible to prevent steam from replacing the steam.styles file by setting its read only property to true.

The font size of input box is controlled by another file: Steam\Friends\ChatRoomDlgFriend.res

Open it in any text editor and in section styles, subsection Textentryfocus_chat you will find the line font-size=16. Edit the number as you like.

But you should know that this file will be replaced on steam startup even if the read only property is set to true. So to keep the preferred font size, you will have to create a custom skin for Steam, but don't worry, it's very easy:

• Create a folder with a name that will be the name of your custom skin in Steam\skins
• Create a path Steam\skins\<Your custom skin name>\resource\styles and copy your edited steam.styles file there.
• Create a path Steam\skins\<Your custom skin name>\friends and copy your edited ChatRoomDlgFriend.res there too.
• Now restart Steam, go to Settings > Interface, select the skin you just created and restart Steam.

You can fix the font size in the chat input by changing font sizes in the files ChatRoomDlg.res and ChatRoomDlgFriend.res found under Steam\friends.

Search font-size= with ctrl+f and change the first occurrence in ChatRoomDlg.res and the first two in ChatRoomDlgFriend.res to the desired font size.