All entries for Friday 16 July 2010

Windows Live and Droid font problem

In which I use the word Droid more than once but resist working in a Star Wars reference. Except for that one.

I logged in to Windows Live earlier using the test account I have access to ahead of the Student email migration to Live@Edu and was dismayed to discover the text was pretty much unreadable.

Last time I logged in, which was probably a few weeks ago, it was fine. Some digging with Firebug reveals that the CSS for the page specifies this for the font family

As luck would have it I happen to know that I have a font called Droid installed on my computer. I'm using SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop and it's one of the many fonts provided in the free-ttf-fonts package. That font looks like this

Which explains why the Windows Live webpage text is unreadable. Firefox is doing exactly what it should be doing in the circumstances. It's looking at the list of font families specified in the CSS, finding that the first family specified in the list is available and using it. Unfortunately in this case the Droid font is not suitable for use at the size being specified and the result is text that is mostly unreadable.

Since I've had that Droid font installed for ages and the Windows Live page used to display fine, I can only assume Microsoft have added the mention of Droid to the CSS very recently. I'm guessing it was done for users on Android devices as Android comes with a font called Droid which looks nothing like the one I have installed and would be perfectly suitable for use on the Windows Live page.

So what to do about this? My first thought, renaming the file that provides the Droid font (/usr/share/fonts/truetype/droid___.ttf), doesn't work becase the name of the font is independent of the filename. You can call the file whatever you like but it still contains a font called Droid. I could probably write a Greasemonkey script to remove the mention of Droid from the CSS but the solution I've gone with for now is to just remove the font by deleting /usr/share/fonts/truetype/droid___.ttf

Mike Willis : 16 Jul 2010 12:59 |  Tags: Droid Font Live Windows |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem