Why are my browser fonts showing up as outlines?

[hellodon]

I seriously thought that this was a new trend of some sort....I noticed a lot of sites lately have Helvetica showing up as outlines rather than solid letters.

Today I just happened to bring it up to a friend of mine and asked him what he thought of this new trend showing up and showed him a site as an example and he said "what are you talking about" and showed me a screen shot....his looks normal....mine looks like outlined letters.

Does anyone know why this would be happening? It happens in both Safari and Firefox for me....I'm thinking it might be a font installed on my computer somehow overriding a default font but how would I look into something like this or fix it?

Please help - now that I know its not some new trend to have outlined letters....I want it back to normal!

Heres the same images we swapped...mines the dumb looking one.

Its not EVERY font....just THAT font and only when in bold.
Thanks!

 

[hellodon]

Anyone see this before? I'm so confused.

 

[MarkMS]

Never seen this before. Have you tried booting in Safe Mode? Booting into Safe Mode should keep corrupt fonts and font caches from loading. If that helps, all you probably need is a font cache cleaner like Onyx or Maintenance. Onyx is a full-fledged maintenance suite, while Maintenance is made for deleting caches.

 

[Makosuke]

MarkMS's font caches suggestion is one possibility. A second, as you guessed, is that something you added is overriding (or has replaced) that particular font. In this event, the easiest thing to check would be to figure out what font, exactly, that is supposed to be, and take a look in Font Book to see if there's something with the same name, or if it looks funny there (and thus was maybe replaced by something untoward). If you're not familiar with the way to check that, just point out a couple of pages that display the issue and I or someone else here should be able to tell you pretty quickly.

Since it's in two browsers that pretty much rules out a browser-specific or browser prefs issue, but if you create a new user account and log into that, it will tell you if the funkyness (probably font) is installed only for your user or if it's system-level, which will narrow it down somewhat.