Anyone got any ideas what the fudge is going on here?

At first I thought it was a character encoding problem and a quick switch in the browser would fix it, but the source code looks fine, it should be UTF-8. It's not just one browsers either, every browser I load Twitter in is displaying like this (and it is only Twitter affected) 

Well it looks like it's a problem with the HelveticaNeue font it's using, I'll have to fiddle around and reinstall the font and see if it fixes it.

Quote from: Clock'd 0Ne on February 23, 2012, 11:02:47 AM
Well it looks like it's a problem with the HelveticaNeue font it's using, I'll have to fiddle around and reinstall the font and see if it fixes it.

That font can get messed up on windows. Has happened to me several times in the past.

Its twitter, its pretty much all garbled and unreadable all the time anyway...

  It did actually take me a couple of days to notice!

Quote from: Russell on February 23, 2012, 13:52:27 PM
Its twitter, its pretty much all garbled and unreadable all the time anyway...

exactly what I was going to say lol

Hello!
I'm new on this forum. I was wondering: Have you fixed the problem yet? Once I could fix the problem by using the Compatibility mode but that doesn't seem to work anymore. 

Hi fella, welcome to the forums!

No, sorry, I just stopped checking my Twitter pretty much (it still works fine on Safari though).

The only solution I think is to reinstall your Helvetica fonts or delete them, I can try sending you the ones I have to see if it fixes it for you.


I'm just deleting mine now to try it, although it keeps telling me they are in use so I will have to reboot to finish deleting them I think.


Doing some more reading the problem is with 'old' versions of the Helvetica/Helvetica Neue fonts, if you use only OpenType or TrueType versions the problem shouldn't appear, I'm going to reinstall mine one by one and delete the bad fonts.

Hi!
Well thanks to your comment about the font I tried a few things in that direction and I got it to work like so:
tools>internet options>general>accessibility>ignore font styles specified on web pages
That's in IE9

Thanks
oh and I'm a lady 

That is going to mess up the web for you big time, And why are you using IE9? Install a decent browser like chrome or firefox and use that

Then you are most welcome, madame


I have the same problem in every browser except Safari, Liam, which seems to use its own version of Helvetica (probably a Mac based version)

Thanks for the suggestion about the browser but I dont like Firefox (my husband has it on his computer) and I can't get Chrome to install on my computer. It keeps telling me The downloaded file failed verification.

I deleted all the 100s of Helvetica fonts I had installed (God knows why there are so many variants) and all is well again. I dislike it anyway, it's a poor looking substitute for Arial on Windows machines and most modern designs avoid using it, so I won't bother installing it again.

but I need the font because I work with files(flashfiles) which use specific fonts. If the fonts are not embedded, the file takes it from my computer. If it's not there it uses a substitute and messes up the design!
For now I'm quite happy with the solution 'ignore font styles specified on web pages'

Excuse moi the funny English, Im dutch

Yeah, it's a pain when you're a designer. As I said, you could try reinstalling the fonts one by one until you find the culprit, but that could take forever. Hopefully Twitter will switch to some forward thinking at some point with their stylesheets, if they set font-family: sans-serif; instead of setting Helvetica/Helvetica Neue/Arial specifically then the browser would choose whichever is most appropriate! Seeing as it's quite a widely documented problem you would think that they would take notice.