Helvetica font stack now has Verdana in it

problem
1

Newsblur on my Windows 10 machines recently started rendering in a different font. Turns out the font has changed to Verdana. I checked the font stack that Newsblur is sending and it is now:
“Lucida Grande”,Verdana,“Helvetica Neue”,Helvetica,sans-serif

I don’t think Verdana belongs in a Helvetica font stack. Is this due to a recent change?

Also, out of curiosity, is there a way to change the font that the sidebar and other interactive elements render with? The font family options in the style dialog only seem to affect the stories box.

BTW - Thanks for the best RSS reader ever.

1 Like
2

I don’t think it is new, I have been relying on the Helvetica choice to show me Verdana (my preferred screen reading font) for some time.

3

I definitely won’t argue with your preference for Verdana, but in my experience Verdana is not typical in a Helvetica font stack. Usually it is Arial on a Windows machine. See http://www.cssfontstack.com/helvetica or https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/better-helvetica/. I think the stack should actually read:
 “Lucida Grande”,Arial,“Helvetica Neue”,Helvetica,sans-serif
instead of:
“Lucida Grande”,Verdana,“Helvetica Neue”,Helvetica,sans-serif

I just took a look at the fonts installed on my computer, and “Lucida Grande” is not there. Now I’m wondering if “Lucida Grande” is the font that got changed in the stack. That could explain why I am seeing Verdana now. Either that or “Lucida Grande” got uninstalled on my system somehow.

What would be really great is to have an option to change the font for all the interactive elements, same way that we can change the font for the stories box.

4

Another quick follow up. I think “Lucida Grande” used to be “Lucida Sans”. I used a Firefox extension called Stylish to override CSS on newsblur.com. Making the change from “Lucida Grande” to “Lucida Sans” brought my system back to the way the site used to look.

5

Yep, Lucida Sans was removed because it was causing headaches for people who have Adobe products installed. They would get NewsBlur in italics instead. I wish there was a better Lucida font choice for Windows.

6

My thought is to replace Verdana with Arial in the font stack. The transition that I experienced from Lucida Sans to Verdana is pretty jarring, and Verdana really does not belong in the Helvetica font stack IMHO. But I understand that there are other people who already rely on the fallback to Verdana, such as Bill above, so maybe it is not such a good idea.

Have you considered adding a font drop down to allow us to customize the font stack for all of the interactive elements on the page? That would probably alleviate most of the font issues and/or complaints.