Last Updated: February 25, 2016
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1.315K
· nickheer

Workaround for too-heavy italic weight of Helvetica Neue on iOS

OY: THIS HAS BEEN FIXED IN iOS 7.1. JOY OF JOYS.

If you've built something recently which uses Helvetica Neue at 400 (regular) weight and which sometimes uses italics, you may have noticed that its italics are too heavy on iOS:

iPhone

OS X

Try it for yourself by visiting this page

It's a known issue; my radar was marked as a duplicate. As a workaround, I've specified this in my CSS:

@media screen and (max-width: 1024px){em{font-family: 'Helvetica';}}

The two font families are close enough that it's not too jarring – at least, it's less jarring than the noticeably too-heavy italics of Helvetica Neue.

The CSS isn't exactly a pro tip, but I think it's important that this gets indexed by search engines so that the problem is identified, even if the remedy is a bit silly.