Design Meme

I recently upgraded my computer at work to a new iMac running OS X Leopard. I’m very happy with the new system, but today I noticed something strange with how fonts were being displayed on some websites. For sites with light text on a dark background the fonts were displaying as bolded, or “bleeding” onto the background in a not very smooth manner. I tried going into System Preferences > Appearance and adjusting the Font Smoothing Style, but this didn’t seem to have any affect on the problem.

Next, I tried running the Font Book application, hilighted all the fonts and selected File > Validate Fonts. This revealed a number of warnings for duplicate fonts (Arial, Times New Roman, Tahoma, Georgia, Verdana and the other fonts from Microsoft). I’m guessing they were copied to the system from my old computer by the Migration Assistant when I first setup the new iMac.

After removing the duplicate fonts and restarting my browser, all the text on this site is displaying properly again.