I recently installed Ubuntu on my computer and when I logged in on Tumblr I noticed that the headings didn’t have the usual sans-serif font. I thought this was weird, because I knew I had installed the msttcorefonts, which includes Arial, Verdana and so on.

After some debugging I found out that the headings only had Helvetica set as font-family (not anymore though, bug reported and fixed), which also was weird, since I didn’t have Helvetica on Windows.

Then simen- came up with a theory that Windows maybe is built to replace Helvetica with Arial if it isn’t installed, which sounds pretty logic since that basically was the reason why Arial was made.

And today, because I was really bored, I confirmed that theory with a simple Google-search. Check this out:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\FontSubstitutes"Helvetica”=”Arial”

So… if you want to be a hard core web developer, I guess you could remove that registry key. If you want to be even more hard core, replace “Arial” with “Wingdings”. >:K