IE9 won’t render some pages – Adobe PostScript fonts to blame

As both a web and print designer for a number of years, my toolkit for both mediums has grown quite extensive. But recently I experienced a problem after upgrading to Windows7. Yes, admittedly I was late to the party on getting Win7 installed as I had built a suitable workflow for both print and web based on XP. But I needed IE9 for proper site testing and the Win7 environment was far superior than Vista – which I refused to be a party to.

After upgrading, I had a devil of a time getting IE9 to render a large number sites properly. It seemed quite random at first. In many cases pages would not render at all, or if they did, much of the site functionality was dead. Research provided me little consolation, so I finally put in a call to Microsoft Technical Support. We went round and round for several weeks trying to isolate the issue. But they were finally able to point me to the solution.

The Problem:
In a nutshell IE9 does not play well with Adobe Type 1 fonts. In my case, I had a number of legacy Type 1’s loaded in my system from previous print work.  This bug gets kicked off  if the said Type 1 font is specified in the CSS of a given site. For example, if a site has this CSS declaration (which is REALLY common):

font-family:"Helvetica, Arial, san-serif";

If you have, as I did, have an Adode Type 1 version of  Helvetica installed on your system any pages invoking this CSS declaration will simply not work in IE9.

As a designer, I had purchased huge volumes of typefaces over the years and simply moved them forward as I upgraded boxes.

The Solution:
Remove all .AFM  and .PFB fonts and replace them with their True Type .TTF or Open Type .OTF versions. This will allow you to continue to work with theses faces while avoiding the IE bug that kills page rendering.

What would be nice:
Microsoft states that they have no plan to ever support Type 1’s on IE going forward. OK fine, it’s your browser, support what you will. But since this decision essentially kills large numbers of sites under certain conditions, Microsoft should at least synch up their font management tools to simply not allow Type 1’s into their environment. This would prevent users from having to spend countless hours tracking this bug (feature?) down.