Quote Originally Posted by FxMan View Post
I selected "allow pages to choose their own fonts...."
and the page rendered correctly with the text where it should be.
So this is the actual reason. This option is enabled by default and disabling it is one of that user settings that go against standards and may ruin any design. This tells browser to completely ignore some of the CSS properties which are supposed to be not ignored by the standards compliant browsers. So it this case you had chosen to not see the sites the way they were supposed to be seen.

As you disabled this option, Firefox was no longer looking at the actual font typesets used on the page and was using default "Verdana". So it was irrelevant if you have Tahoma or Trebuchet actually.
I do have Tahoma installed.
Yes, but as your browser was configured to ignore page font settings, it was not even looking for it.
I have Arial as well.
Yes, but it is not set as the browser default font. So it wasn't looked for as well. Also, in case if you had no Tahome and the "allow pages to choose their own fonts" enabled, then the Verdana would be still used as the sans-serif is not set to Arial.
I also have Verdana as the default browser font.
Yes, and so this font is forced by the "allow pages..." option.
I did in fact have Verdana set as the mono-spaced font.
I changed that to Tahoma and....it still breaks out.
The monospaced font setting has nothing to do with this particular page. I was mentioning this setting because monospaced font is a special kind of font that has all the characters of the same width. Like Courier for example. It's defined this way by standards. Neither Verdana not Tahoma is a monospaced font. It's better to leave the default Courier New in this place. Some pages may suffer from this.
So, I have at least 2 of the safe fonts, Arial and Tahoma.
Good.
Tahoma set as the default mono-spaced font now.
Bad.
I have Verdana as the sans-serif font because I like the way it looks, and my eyes are used to it.
Good as long as you have Tahoma and not enabled "allow pages to choose their own fonts..." option.
That is in fact the problem.
Yes.
I have had Verdana as my browser font for many years and have only encountered the font issue on a couple of sites up until recently, with the WD made sites.
Well, same is true on the other side - we have a lot of sites produced by WD and we've had very few reported text issues similar to yours.

So it's just an unfortunate coincidence. Would the Verdana be used as the design font it would look correctly for you. Would you prefer Arial instead of Verdana, it would also look good for you. But the fact that you had forced your browser to ignore standards brought risk of page rendering issues, more or less serious, but it was always there. It's like driving on the wrong side of the road.

Cheers!