Why is my font displaying so thin and almost unreadable?

My font is really thin to the point where it is nearly unreadable.

Does anyone know a fix for this?

My operating system is Windows 10 and this only happens on certain sites, yahoo and Stack Overflow being two of them

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8 Answers

I had the exact same issue. I tried ALL the suggested fixes, like the windows update security issue and all these very technical methods. I tried re-installing fonts and at one point I even laid hands on my PC and prayed for it to repel the font demon that was cursing my computer!

MY FIX: Go to your font directory and delete all the HELVETICA fonts, especially the "Helvetica Neue Thin" font. I had to use SHIFT+DELETE to make sure it was gone for good, and I also had to close and reopen the font folder a couple times. Once they were gone...BAM! No more font issues on the pages that were driving me crazy!! Good Luck!

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I fixed my problem on Google Chrome running on Windows 10 by installing all 12 Roboto fonts from

After installing them and restarting the browser everything started to look normal again.

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While you are still looking at a website in your browser, use the key combination Ctrl + 0 (that's the number zero). This restores the zoom level if you have accidentally changed it (which may cause the symptoms you have described).

If that does not do it, check these solutions provided at Mozilla forums:

• This contains several solutions, including:

If you right-click the problem text and choose Inspect Element (Q), Firefox should open the Inspector tool in the lower part of the tab. On the right side across from the HTML source code is a box that can usually shows style Rules. Click the little Fonts heading to show the font being used for the problem text.

When I visit the sites, the problem text is in "Gotham Narrow" (with more words displayed in the attached screen shots). These are downloadable fonts.

And this:

Type about:preferences#content in the address bar. Across from fonts and colors, press the Advanced button. On the bottom, turn on Allow Web Sites To Choose Their Own.

• This one deals with fonts displaying badly after Windows Update kb3013455. The recommendation was to uninstall that update.

And if none of these recommendations work, also try getting the latest display drivers for your hardware. If you do not know how to do that, please provide information about your display hardware which can be obtained as explained here:

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This font issue happened to me after a Windows update. I selected Tahoma as standard font in Chrome settings. Any installed font should do it. Then restart browser.

Change font to Tahoma in google chrome settings. tried deleting ultra light but wouldn't let me so this worked! Like this

2020-05-29 Blurry Font issue in Chrome. Hard to read web pages.

I was having a font issue in chrome. The body font would always render in a kind of skinny font that was poorly defined. I tried all the suggested fixes for windows clear type, changing the fonts in chrome, clearing cache, turning off hardware acceleration etc.

The problem didn't affect MS Edge. I updated Edge to Edge Chromium, to see what would happen and to see if I could glean some answers by playing with settings in the new version of edge. Bam! as soon as I finished upgrading, Edge had the same problem. Adjusting Appearances/Fonts in Edge also got no results.

I remembered that someone somewhere had posted something about the default Windows font. (Sorry, I couldn't find it again to reference it.)

I checked the registry and found that the default font entry was blank. I don't have any idea if this is normal or not. I changed it to read "arial.ttf".  I basically copied the Arial (TrueType) registry entry. I then rebooted my computer. Boom! it fixed the problem with both browsers. I haven't noticed it having a poor effect on anything else either. (At least not yet.)

Here is the technical info:

• Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Fonts
• Find the (Default) Entry.
• Modify the entry to read "arial.ttf".
• Reboot your computer.

Good Luck!

Obviously this is the registry, so be careful! You can really screw things up.

Here is a picture of what the correct entry looks like. (The location of the registry entry is at the top instead of the bottom so that you can see it better, but you don't have to worry about that.)

To make your fonts more readable on your website, just add these lines to your CSS:

@media screen and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio:0) { /* Safari and Chrome (font weight fix) */ BODY {text-shadow: transparent 0px 0px 0px, rgba(0,0,0,0.68) 0px 0px 0px !important;} }

If you want to increase readability of fonts on all the websites you visit with Chrome, you can use this free extension: Font Rendering Enhancer. It applies the same CSS fix automatically to all pages.

UPDATE: For a more accurate fix you can add the following Javascript to your website:

 // FIX text rendering on Chrome (by TFI) function FixChromeFonts() { var Max_Darkness=255 // 0-255 var AllElem=document.body.querySelectorAll(':not(script):not(style):not(area):not(base):not(br):not(col):not(embed):not(hr):not(img):not(input):not(keygen):not(link):not(meta):not(param):not(source):not(track):not(wbr):not(table):not(tbody):not(tr):not(ul)') for (var i=0;i<AllElem.length;i++) { for (var j=0;j<AllElem[i].childNodes.length;j++) { // cycle through element nodes if (AllElem[i].childNodes[j].nodeType===3 && AllElem[i].childNodes[j].textContent.trim().length>0) { // is it a text node? var Col=window.getComputedStyle(AllElem[i]).getPropertyValue('color').replace(/[^\d,]/g,'').split(',') // text color array (R/G/B) var Lum=Math.round(0.2126*Col[0]+0.7152*Col[1]+0.0722*Col[2]) // luminosity var Opa=parseFloat(Max_Darkness*(255-Lum)/65025).toFixed(1) // opacity between 0 and 1 if (Lum<128) Opa=1 AllElem[i].style.setProperty('text-shadow','0 0 0 rgba('+Col[0]+','+Col[1]+','+Col[2]+','+Opa+')','important') // set text shadow with alpha break } } } }
if (navigator.appVersion.indexOf("Chrome/") != -1) window.onload=function(){FixChromeFonts()}

It adds shadows of the same color to text, and their darkness depends on luminosity. Hope it helps.

I changed SessionBuddy settings to Classic Font. That improved the readability.

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