How to set sans-serif fonts in Firefox without losing special characters

Question

I do not like serif fonts. So for years I just went to Settings in Firefox, than Content > Font & Colors > Advanced, and set Arial as Serif font. Also, I had to uncheck "Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of my selection above". It had the side benefit, that the smallest letters were defined by me, not a designer from Lilliput.

However, lately more and more sites use special fonts to show things they earlier used pictures for. In the attahced picture, the "PM" part would have been normal letters or an image 2 years ago.

My question is, how can I set large sans-serif characters in Firefox for Windows without losing the special characters?

Answer 1

Firefox is supposed to choose optically similar fonts for glyphs that are not present in the preferred font. However, all of the missing glyphs in your image are from the private use area (E800), which means they are using web fonts to provide symbols not defined in Unicode. The only font that has them is the font the web site provides.

If it were not a special font, I'd say to install Arial Unicode MS as your default sans-serif font to get all of the missing glyphs.

Instead, you might be able to solve the problem for particular websites by defining a user stylesheet. There are several add ons for Firefox to help you do this, such as User Style Manager. I would suggest trying to include the special font the website uses as a lower priority font.

Something else you can try with user stylesheets is to just set the font-size without setting the font-family. That will allow the web designer's font-face through while keeping the tiny fonts sanely sized.

Most websites have gone sans-serif these days, so you shouldn't be in too much danger of seeing serif fonts if you go the latter route.