As I was toiling away on my wife’s website, I came across an extremely weird and frustrating bug/problem. She adamantly wanted to use Helvetica as the font for the text on her e-commerce site; being a non-designer myself, I had no objections, and I put it in the font-family list in the CSS, and then added more mainstream fonts as backups.

After doing so, we noticed all of a sudden that the site was acting strangely in Safari. Most of the pages displayed gibberish, actually what looked like a bunch of numbers and fractions, instead of the text copy. Not being a Mac fan or guru, I struggled to find any semblance of an answer, as I wasn’t sure if it was the browser, or Mac OS X, or what.

Finally I found this Usenet posting that finally described my symptoms in detail. Bullet point 1 was my issue. Looks like for some reason Helvetica Fractions font gets used instead of Helvetica by the OS/Mac browser. Whether it’s due to a font cache issue, or a corrupt font, I’m not sure. Regardless, it’s random (can happen to any Safari user) and I can’t afford to do much else other than make the site work out of the gates for all users (I can’t afford any display issues for any potential user).

So we ended up removing the use of Helvetica altogether; even one unhappy or confused/lost customer is too many. Arial was a nice compromise….but I share this to warn others considering that font, or those who use Safari and wonder what’s going on when some sites have garbled text.