Google-chrome – Helvetica fonts always rendering as bold in Chrome

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This started happening a few days ago and I can't figure it out. When using Chrome, any text with font-family Helvetica or 'Helvetica Neue' always render in a super heavy/bold font. For example, facebook now looks like this:

Chrome Renders:

Facebook showing incorrect font for Helvetica

Firefox Renders:

enter image description here

It only happens in Chrome. Firefox/IE work fine. It only seems to effect Helvetica fonts. Other fonts or no font-family defined render normally. When I switched computers the strange font actually appeared on the second computer as well making me think it's in a Chrome setting somewhere that stays with my account. Nothing in the Chrome settings/Show Advanced Settings/Web Content seems to effect it at all. When I copy and paste the text from Chrome into Word it renters normally and has Helvetica listed as the font. Although strangely when I choose the fonts drop-down Helvetica-Black is listed but not Helvetica.

Any ideas?!

Best Answer

Ok, so as I was writing the question I think I stumbled on the fix. In my installed fonts (Start/Run/Fonts), I somehow had Helvetica Black, but not any other version of Helvetica. It seems Chrome was picking the black version making everything look super bold. I certainly didn't manually install Helvetica Black on two computers in the last week, but it's possible that Chrome recently changed how it picks fonts or I used/installed some other software that installed Helvetica Black?

To recap, my fix was:

  • Go to your fonts folder (Start/Run/Fonts)
  • Find and delete Helvetica Black
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