"Arial Black" no longer works on Firefox

[londrum]

I know this is probably old news to some people, but for some reason my firefox 3.1.6 didnt prompt me to upgrade to 4 and 5. so when i finally upgraded today i got a bit of a shock... firefox no longer supports "arial black"!

it sounds crazy but its true. i've had a read on the net and apparently they dont recognise it as a font anymore.

a lot of my headings were done in arial black so i've hastly been going through the whole lot swapping them out for arial.

whoever made that decision at firefox must be a bit dopey. i thought arial black was quite widespread?

[tangor]

Scratching head... works for me and I'm currently running FF 5.0...
Nice page to test what "web safe" fonts are installed/working: [web.mit.edu...]

There is some commentary that Arial Black does not work under Unix-X, and some Linus versions...

[londrum]

this is a dumb question, but are you sure its not just switching to a bolded arial instead? i put

font-family:"arial black",courier

in one of my styles to check, and it's picking courier every time.

found a bug report about it on the mozilla site - [support.mozilla.com ]

[tangor]

Even more dumb question, which version of FF are you running? (5.0 is current, all the statements in link above were for 4.x). Also, what is the version of Arial Black installed on your system? What OS?

Runs fine for me. That said, I tend to be very simple in my font choices for display and while I have ON OCCASION used Arial Black, I tend to avoid it. The "web" still does not satisfy all the "font guys" and "designers" and it might be some time to come before it does.

Upgrade your Arial Black install... some versions of Unix do not support it.

EDIT: Should add that I'm XP64... no Win7 in the house at moment... tad behind times. :(

[tangor]

Made me look... appears that under WIN7 Arial Black is not recognized in the font dialog, this displays incorrectly. Any FONT WEIGHT applied will be applied to Arial (not Arial Black). Something is broken in this regard, and it is NOT Firefox.

See previous, I AVOID excessive font use, sticking to Times, Courier, Arial, Helvetica, Serif, Sans Serif, with Bold, Italic (or Strong, Emphasis) and font size. Can't relate how many different times I've been surprised that my PRETTY GENERIC layouts have appeared Really Strange on different computers... and I KISS!

The web is NOT graphic artist layout friendly... but does work pretty close to "desktop publishing"...

[londrum]

im Win7 and Firefox 5. im taking them all off anyway, because if i'm having the problem then im sure plenty of other people are too. most people wont bother to reinstall stuff, they'd just see that your site looks wierd and leave.

i didnt realise that arial black was an unsafe font. been using it for ten years

[tangor]

MS is aware see:
[connect.microsoft.com...]

As to when a fix/patch will appear... can't say. Apparently version 2.35 of the font is okay, unfortunately version 2.40 breaks the Windows font dialog and it appears in XP SP3 and all Win7 installs.

Since MS has a vested interest in Arial (all versions) since they created it for Monotype way back when, it will get sorted... question is "When?"

Questions like this are good to view from time to time... reminds us that things we take for granted can be broken when least expected... The only other font I occasionally use is "Bookman" and so far that hoary old thing still appears okay...