Prevent specific local installed font from being used in webbrowser (Helvetica) - Hardware & Software

On my work computer (Windows) I have Helvetica installed on my Windows PC. I need this font for various graphic design tasks. It works fine in Photoshop or Illustrator. However, because Helvetica is installed on my PC, many web sites detect that I have it installed and try to use it, which is a problem as it makes the website look non-standard, and part of my job is making tutorials that include website screenshots or videos. For example, here's how it should look (ignore the typos, work in progress): https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/208523/dae7a3c3-910e-4270-b1cc-e962a72b8ae4/image.png And here's how it looks with Helvetica: https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/208523/2e449684-130a-43e0-98d1-cc6b1d0fb0ab/image.png It's a pain having to go into Stylus in my web browser to add a custom CSS script for whatever body or header text is affected, and sometimes certain sites change font size or spacing which means changing just the font itself isn't enough. Is there a way I can just prevent Firefox or another web browser from letting websites know i have that particular font installed? I don't want to disable local fonts entirely, just Helvetica.

This should be a browser setting - websites typically set a CSS that looks similar to this. font-family: sans-serif,serif Basically this instructs the browser to render it's favourite sans-serif font rather than any specific one. Searching for Font in Firefox settings gives me this option: https://i.imgur.com/nXYW1K8.png

That is browser wide and affects all fonts, which is something I don't want. I still want sites to use their preferred fonts, just not detect that I have Helvetica and force my browser to use that. Browsers have fallback fonts they use if the font they're looking for is not installed locally and not hosted on a server. Specifically, since Helvetica is generally a Mac-only font, sites that want to have the Mac font show up for consistency across the OS usually make Helvetica the preferred font in the CSS, as other basic fonts are on all systems and thus browsers can rely on them being installed. It's also a lazy way of determining if a user is on a Mac by device fingerprinting. I assume they'd need to license it to use as a web hosted font otherwise.

Could you just uninstall Helvetica from Windows?

Yes, let's tell all our users to uninstall a font to view our website correctly

If it's your website just fix the damn CSS. This whole thing is really circular.

It isn't my website though, updated shitty zinger my post

Ended up solving it by compeletely uninstalling Helvetica, then opening the Helvetica fonts in Font Forge and renaming their name and font family to MACHelvetica. Now websites can't detect it but I can still use it in Photoshop. Fucking roundabout way of doing it though. To clarify, this wasn't a website I owned, it's a LMS platform and a portfolio website we use that we don't have complete control over (Blackboard Learn and Digication).

By the way Photoshop, Illustrator etc. have the ability to use fonts which are otherwise not installed (so Windows isn't aware of their existence). You need to drop them into: "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Fonts" (you can use subfolders there) It's a great way to keep the Windows fonts folder clean.

We had a funny issue at work relating to this. I was using a font from Google Fonts and one of the guys was saying that he was really struggling to see the text on our website, but it displayed fine on everyone else's computers. After a long time of not knowing what the issue was, it turned out he had the font installed locally but only with a very thin font weight, so all the text on the site was displayed really thin. It would be good if there was a way to tell the browser to prioritise fonts from the website (e.g. Google Fonts) as opposed to loading them locally, although I don't think that's currently available in CSS