Tuesday, April 18, 2006

XP, Outlook & fonts

More hassle.

Sometimes I get emails from people (in Outlook) that render awfully. The same people, about a handful of them. Everyone else, including me, is fine (we all use Arial). They use Helvetica 45 Light as a default font, and that makes the journey across to me. Except my Outlook decides to render this font on screen as italic. And it's a pig to read.

If I select a part of the italic text, Format->Font, it shows as 'Regular'. If I change it to 'Italic', the screen rendering doesn't change. If I change it back to 'Regular', it still doesn't change.

However, if I select the whole mail, then cycle the fonts as above it renders normally, in an upright 'regular' font way.

Solution: delete the Helvetica 46 Light Italic font from the Font widget in Control Panel. For some reason, Outlook prefers it to the 45 Light (non-italic), so deleting it forces it to match for the much more reasonable font - the one the email is written in.

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