Woah! Some fonts look weird in IE11 on Win7

We upgraded several of our machines at work to Windows 7. I noticed on Internet Explorer 7, some fonts look weird (see attachment). What causes that and is there a way to make it better?

 

Did you check the video drivers? That doesn't look like a font issue to me.

 

I checked them and they are up to date.

For a reference, see the attachment for what the same page looks like in Firefox.

 

I was trying to figure out what that reminded me of.

Have you checked your cleartype settings? IE renders fonts differently than Firefox does.

https://www.microsoft.com/typography/cleartype/tuner/tune.aspx

 

I checked the clear type settings and everything was fine. I may check another PC to compare. It's just certain fonts that are doing this.

 

Hey there, can you link me to that first (is it craigslist?) site?


I want to see if they are using a certain font.

Also, reset IE back to defaults to make sure nobody changed it.

 

http://knoxville.craigslist.org/pha/

 

Thanks.


Ok, that font is Times.

Try this. Go to control panel, fonts.
Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Fonts

On the left go to Fonts Settings, and then click 'Restore default font settings'.

 

Unfortunately, that did nothing.

I also got the same looking font in an email that displayed like that. It is Helvetica.

 

Has this been happening since the install of Windows 7?

 

Yes, new machine. Been that way from the start that I remember.

 

Could you try SafeMode w/ Networking for me and see if the same issue appears on pages?

Unless IE is damaged, I have a hard time understanding what the cause could be. It seems unlikely that fonts are damaged because other browsers use those fonts too. You did reset IE, right?

You might also want to try Internet Explorer with no add-ons:

Winkey on keyboard + r:

iexplore.exe -extoff

 

I looked on a new machine that has had nothing (except Windows updates) added to it and there is a difference.

 

One other thing. These new machines that are doing this had old files, info, etc. transferred from the XP machines using the transfer wizard. The image off the last computer image has not had that done yet. I'm wondering if something transferred that has messed up these fonts.

 

I conducted a bit of an experiment. The last new machine I had I used the easy transfer wizard from my old one to the new one to see if something gets transferred to corrupt the fonts. Well, nothing changed. After that, I installed a bunch of our fonts we use and did not copy over any that were already on the new machine. That changed them on IE. So there's a bad font in there somewhere. I'll have to narrow it down and see if removing it fixes it.

 

One more follow up. The font in question is Helvetica. There appears to be a couple of different variations of it. I copied the version off my home computer onto the work computer and it fixed the issue. Not sure how often I need this font, so I may get rid of it.

 

Thanks for the heads up.