Overriding Web Fonts For Easier Reading

If you’ve ever found it difficult to read certain things on web sites, you can in fact force the font you want and its minimum size fairly easily with the Mozilla Firefox web browser.

Getting a good set of fonts

Note before continuing: You may already have these fonts installed. Head to your Control Panel and the Fonts category to check first.

Three fantastic fonts that look great and are along the same metric as other standard Windows fonts are the “Liberation” family. Specifically, Liberation Serif (good alternative for Times New Roman), Liberation Sans (good alternative for Arial) and Liberation Mono (FANTASTIC alternative for Courier New).

These three fonts are free and are available for download right here. Just click the small “Download TTF” for each (TTF means TrueType font).

If you don’t feel like downloading or installing any new fonts, here are some alternatives you already have installed:

Alternative for Times New Roman: Palatino Linotype
Alternative for Arial: Lucida Sans Unicode
Alternative for Courier New: Lucida Console

Setting up Firefox to always use the fonts you want

Once you’ve decided on which fonts you want to use, here’s how to get Firefox to always use them:

Step 1. Firefox Menu > Options OR Tools > Options

Step 2. Content (tab)

Step 3. Advanced (button) under “Fonts & Colors” heading

You’ll end up here:

There are five things we’re going to change from top-to-bottom: Serif, Sans-serif, Monospace, Minimum font size and unchecking “Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of my selections above”.

Here’s how it would look when changing the fonts to the Liberation family, setting a minimum font size and unchecking the aforementioned checkbox:

After completing the changes, you click OK and it’s applied immediately. After that, browse a few web pages and see how everything looks.

A few more tips:

If you want everything in an “Arial-looking” font, go back to the settings above and change “Proportional” from Serif to Sans-serif. Some people greatly prefer this over Roman-looking fonts when reading things on-screen, and that’s how you do it.

Also remember that if you want to set things back the way they were, simply use the first screen shot above as a guide and just make everything match up.