Sstrhsrtj

Gnome 3 panel and menu fonts are way too small. (I like using menu's as long as I used mouse and keyboard. Touchscreen, now, that would be different) Is there a tool or extension or anything that can adjust those?

I did figure out one way to do it, after spending far too much time on this question. In gnome tweaks, font settings, first adjust (font) scaling until panel and menu fonts look good. Then set the rest of the fonts until whole desktop looks nice. But this is a clumsy way to do it. For one thing, you cannot change panel/menu font this way. Only size.

Is there any way to adjust those, short of patching gnome 3 sources and recompiling the whole desktop? As far as I can figure it out, that is the only other way...

You may use (GNOME) Tweaks, previously known as (GNOME) Tweak Tool. It's a graphical interface for advanced GNOME 3 settings.

You should get what you're looking for in this tool:

(screenshot source)

You may create a custom CSS override for the shell theme in your home directory and load it from there to change the font of the top bar (which is controlled by the shell theme). To do that follow the steps below.

1. Create a directory, say MyTheme in ~/.themes.


2. Create another directory inside MyTheme called gnome-shell.


3. Create an empty document in this gnome-shell directory and name it gnome-shell.css.


4. 
   

   Open this gnome-shell.css in a text editor and add the following lines

   
   
   

   stage {
   
       font-family: FONT_NAME, Sans-Serif;
   
       font-size: 14pt;
   
       color: #ffffff;
   
   }
   
   

   
   
   

   Replace FONT_NAME by a font of your choice and change the font-size to your liking (you may change colour too) and save the file.

   
   



5. Install and activate the User themes extension from here.




6. Go to Appearance section of Tweaks and click on the drop-down box next to "Shell theme". MyTheme should appear in the drop-down list. Select it.




7. Log out and log in again.