That font is the culprit that’s been bugging my blog. I’m using Lucida Sans as my blog’s default HTML body font. Verdana, while more widely available, has become too common on the web, so I wanted another widely available font that’s not Verdana nor Arial. That’s how I settled on Lucida Sans.

The weird bug that’s been bugging me was that the whole site was rendered in italics when I viewed it on the other computer at home. I thought it was a CSS bug with IE6, the browser on that computer. Then I saw the same thing here, right now, in a public Internet café when I viewed it through Firefox! (I installed Firefox here, hehehe.)

Obviously, it wasn’t a browser bug unless Firefox 1.0 PR introduced a new bug that wasn’t on the Firefox 0.9 I use at home. Then it dawned on me that maybe the Lucida Sans on this computer only had the italicized version. Sure enough, that’s what it had. The regular Lucida Sans was named Lucida Sans Unicode so it didn’t match the font I set in my style sheet. I specified the CSS in this way:

font-family: "Lucida Sans","Lucida Sans Unicode",Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;

So when the browser requests a Lucida Sans font from Windows, it gives back Lucida Sans Italic, not Lucida Sans Unicode, which is technically a different font. The obvious solution is to switch the first two font names in my CSS rule. I’ve tried it now and it works.

One bug down, several more to go….