The default font used in many areas of Newsblur looks awful on my Win7 machine in chrome. I have tried changing the default fonts in chrome but it has no effect on the Newsblur fonts. I have attached a screen capture to maybe give you an idea of how ugly it is.
Any suggestions?
Bizarre. I have Windows XP and I test on that.
You do have one choice immediately: Go to Manage > Preferences and switch to a serif font. That will change the font choice right now, before I figure out whatās going on with Win7. Iāll need to find a Win7 machine, which might be difficult since I have never even seen Win7 personally (and I used to intern for Microsoft ā¦ back in the Vista beta days).
Itās related to the fontās size. If I go into chromeās options and set the minimum font size to 13 pts, it looks fine. Anything smaller and it looks real bad.
Serif looks much better. Thanks!
Iāve just changed my Chrome settings minimum font size to 13 and it made NewsBlur so much nicer! I am fine with the default style (itās not great, but ok), but you could consider to change to a bigger font - it really makes a difference. And I am on a 1280x1024 monitor at the moment and it is ok even for this resolution.
This still looks pretty horrible. Iāve tried changing the minimum font size in Chrome, but seriously, this is NOT better.
In Firefox, it looks just fine.
Fonts look just fine āout of the boxā on Windows 8 using the standard touch-sensitive IE browser that ships in Win8. Tested on both the Surface-Pro and the Surface-RT.
In fact, Newsblur is fantastic on the light-weight and long-battery-life Surface-RT tablet using no keyboard, pure touch-screen control only. The three-column layout fits the wide screen very comfortably and you have the full resources of the web app rather than Android or iOS clients. At $349, this makes a lovely Newsblur machine.
(Sent from my Surface-RT)
Since this still looks like ass in chrome and no one seems to be bothering to deal with it, Iāve decided to cancel my renewal and find a new feed reader.
I donāt have access to XP or Win7 anymore (thanks god!) so I canāt test it, but this sounds related:
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/Installā¦
Seems like not Newsblurās fault, but that doesnāt mean it canāt be fixed with some css changes 
I use NewsBlur on Chrome on a number of different computers on different platforms (Win 7, Win 8, OS X, XP) and cannot reproduce this anomaly.
Iāve just starting experiencing this issue on an XP machine with Chrome (latest stable version). Fonts in NewsBlur look blocky as per the original screenshot.
I can fix this in the inspector by changing the preferred font from Lucia Sans. Correspondingly if I go into any other site (such as getsatisfaction) and use the inspector to set the font to Lucia Sans, it has the same problem.
Things look a better in Firefox, but still not great - the font isnāt blocky and rough-looking, but itās still not ideal. So thereās some issue with Lucida Sans but I donāt know if itās software-, OS- or hardware-based.
Interestingly, the font looks absolutely fine in Chrome if I set the zoom to 150%. I looked into this a little closer and if I increment the font size in the inspector it looks normal once it gets to 18pt - anything up to 17pt is blocky, and 18pt and up look fine.
Iāve also tried changing the font to Georgia in the prefs - this selection is saved, but in both Chrome and Firefox it doesnāt seem to have any effect - everything still uses Lucida Sans.
At any rate, as far as my machine goes, changing the default font to something other than Lucida Sans would seem to fix the issue. Hope thatās helpful.
How does the font-preview look if you go to the fonts part of the control panel and open Lucida Sans there?
What happens if you use Lucida Sans as the font in Word (or Wordpad or Notepad for that matter)?
Since I just realized Lucida isnāt a standard font for Windows the above is fairly irrelevant. Better idea, if you open Newsblur in firefox and inspect a problematic text element and then select the Fonts tab in the inspectors sidebar (Rules, Computed, Fonts, Box Model), what font does that say?
I would love to get this fixed. But I canāt take Lucida Sans off the font list, since itās the Mac font. Is there a Windows font that I can put before it that would look better?
My last post was from my work PC, which Iām no longer at. But the problem is the same on my home laptop (Win 7, current stable Chrome). Lucida Sans has the same problem in Word and in font previews, as do some other fonts (but by no means all). Iāve tried retuning and turning off ClearType to no avail (other than it looking worse with it turned off).
I attach two screenshots from the NewsBlur front page - in the first one, at the top you can see the ābadā font, while the Recommended Sites section shows readable text. Theyāre both Lucida Sans - the poor rendering is 12px and the good rendering is 13px.
In the second screenshot Iāve edited the style so both areas use 13px and, as you can see, it fixes the problem (Iām sure it was pt rather than px when I looked at it earlier).
So 13pt Lucida Sans seems a lot better, at least on this laptop. Not sure how helpful that isā¦ Is there scope, perhaps, for either using a web font like Open Sans, or even an āold reliableā like Arial with Lucida Sans as the second-in-line? Iāve no idea as to the logistics of this with regard to NewsBlur, and I know this is something I can fix myself locally, but itās a shame to think that the site might be looking so rough to potential new users.
Thanks for the response!
Huh, didnāt realize Lucida Sans wasnāt on Windows (we have Lucida Sans Unicode Regular). In any case why would putting anything in front of Lucida make a difference? The browser should use the first available font, looking at your font-family string that should be Verdana for any Windows user who isnāt running something older than 98ā¦ Unless they have a borked version of Lucida Sans installed of course.
Canāt honestly think of a good Windows only font apart from Sagoe that is but itās not quite as widely available as one would want.
Maybe add a third font option to preferences which is just font-family: Verdana, Sans-Serif; and nothing else? Or maybe include Open Sans Iād love to see that as an option.
EDIT: Just tracked down and installed Lucida Sans Standard. What an awful font, so narrow. Based on that alone I must say you should add an option for Verdana or Open sans, a nice standard width and easily readable font.
The problem with putting something like Arial first (never use Arial on the web if you have an option, which you always do, Verdana) and Lucida Sans second is that a browser uses the first available font. Thatās why Verdana (or Arial) is usually the second to last (sans-serif being last) with any more specialized fonts put in front for those who have them.
You could always remove Lucida Sans from your computer, itās not a standard font for Windows and it doesnāt seem to work too well for you either.
Having Open-sans as an option would actually be very nice.
As I say, I can certainly fix things at my end, but clearly Iām not the only one whoās experienced the problem. So it seems beneficial to NB in general to fix it (if possible). Clearly itās not a problem with the site itself, but a wider system-level problem that the site is falling prey to.
I havenāt installed any fonts on this machine myself, but I suspect Lucida Sans may have been installed along with Microsoft Office. The computed font is definitely Lucida Sans, and if I change the style to specify Lucida Sans Unicode, the problem goes away, for what thatās worth.
Seems like it does indeed come with Office. Different versions of it with different versions of Office. Wonder why it wasnāt installed with Office for meā¦ Tracked down a download for it, not having any of the blocky issues though.
Hereās a blog post (from years ago) about what looks like the same problem:
http://www.brownbatterystudios.com/siā¦
As I said earlier, changing the style to Lucida Sans Unicode fixes the issue for me, and is also mentioned in the link above. Would it be worth investigating using LSU as the first named font with LS second? Presumably in that scenario standard Windows users would get LSU and standard Mac users would still get LS.
Iāve now fixed this locally by adding a Stylish rule to apply Lucida Sans Unicode to NewsBlur pages. It looks great again, so Iām happy, but if youād like me to remove the style to test any tweaks just let me know.
My local fix is now on userstyles for anyone who might want to use it: