Overriding HTML fonts in recieved messages in Outlook
March 6, 2021 10:17 AM Subscribe
My wife's workplace mandates Calibri on sent messages, which apparently are in HTML with explicit CSS to force a font family. She dislikes Calibri, and wants, for clarity, to be viewing her messages in a font which better differentiates, e.g. an uppercase I (0x49) and a lowercase l (0x6C). She's fine sending messages in Calibri, in accordance with their dicta, but wants rendering on her client to be in some other font, even of messages which explicitly state Calibri as the top of their font stacks.
Searching for solutions to this mostly turns up ways to change the default font for non-explicitly-fonted messages, or how to change the default font on sent messages, which isn't what I want to do. A solution which would work but probably have unacceptable downsides from her point of view is switching the display settings to prefer plaintext to HTML, and then setting the font of her choice for that, but that would also lose every other, non-font piece of formatting.
I'm mostly a Linux guy myself, so my plans approach would be to short-circuit or override the HTML rendering. For webmail I'd use Greasemonkey or the equivalent, and Linux email clients often allow a local custom CSS override. If all else failed I'd find some way to make Calibri invisible or aliased somehow in the font stack, up to and including replacing its damn font files with some other font. But Microsoft is (to understate the case somewhat) less friendly to bare-metal mods of this sort, and I don't know Windows/Outlook config nearly well enoguh to know what is viable there. So is any of this stuff (custom global high-priority CSS, Greasemonkey-like HTML-modfying scripts, or even swapping out font files without breaking anything else) doable in Outlook and/or WIndows generally?
Searching for solutions to this mostly turns up ways to change the default font for non-explicitly-fonted messages, or how to change the default font on sent messages, which isn't what I want to do. A solution which would work but probably have unacceptable downsides from her point of view is switching the display settings to prefer plaintext to HTML, and then setting the font of her choice for that, but that would also lose every other, non-font piece of formatting.
I'm mostly a Linux guy myself, so my plans approach would be to short-circuit or override the HTML rendering. For webmail I'd use Greasemonkey or the equivalent, and Linux email clients often allow a local custom CSS override. If all else failed I'd find some way to make Calibri invisible or aliased somehow in the font stack, up to and including replacing its damn font files with some other font. But Microsoft is (to understate the case somewhat) less friendly to bare-metal mods of this sort, and I don't know Windows/Outlook config nearly well enoguh to know what is viable there. So is any of this stuff (custom global high-priority CSS, Greasemonkey-like HTML-modfying scripts, or even swapping out font files without breaking anything else) doable in Outlook and/or WIndows generally?
I concur, nuke Calibri in the local fontspace and force a fallback.
posted by kschang at 10:45 AM on March 6, 2021
posted by kschang at 10:45 AM on March 6, 2021
If all else failed I'd find some way to make Calibri invisible or aliased somehow in the font stack, up to and including replacing its damn font files with some other font. But Microsoft is (to understate the case somewhat) less friendly to bare-metal mods of this sort
It's not clear if you tried this (deleting the original Calibri files from the Windows font folder, and then copying the desired font's files and renaming them with the original Calibri names so they get picked up when some program is looking for Calibri). Did it not work?
posted by trig at 12:04 PM on March 6, 2021 [1 favorite]
It's not clear if you tried this (deleting the original Calibri files from the Windows font folder, and then copying the desired font's files and renaming them with the original Calibri names so they get picked up when some program is looking for Calibri). Did it not work?
posted by trig at 12:04 PM on March 6, 2021 [1 favorite]
Response by poster: Since three people have offered more-or-less the same suggestion, a clarification on this:
Because institutional branding demands she send messages in Calibri, removing it outright wouldn't work. Replacing it is more feasible, and we haven't tried it yet, but that's because AIUI, Calibri is a system font, and one used a lot, in Windows. It seems plausible that some of the tools she uses every day make some assumptions about its metrics, and so removing and replacing it is a pretty drastic step to take. If that's the only option, we'll consider it, but it seems like a last resort; if there's a way to just locally make Outlook override font-family styles that seems less prone to undesirable side effects.
posted by jackbishop at 12:24 PM on March 6, 2021 [1 favorite]
Because institutional branding demands she send messages in Calibri, removing it outright wouldn't work. Replacing it is more feasible, and we haven't tried it yet, but that's because AIUI, Calibri is a system font, and one used a lot, in Windows. It seems plausible that some of the tools she uses every day make some assumptions about its metrics, and so removing and replacing it is a pretty drastic step to take. If that's the only option, we'll consider it, but it seems like a last resort; if there's a way to just locally make Outlook override font-family styles that seems less prone to undesirable side effects.
posted by jackbishop at 12:24 PM on March 6, 2021 [1 favorite]
It seems plausible that some of the tools she uses every day make some assumptions about its metrics, and so removing and replacing it is a pretty drastic step to take.
This can be a problem. You can look for fully metric-compatible fonts (e.g. Carlito for Calibri) but to preserve those metrics, they often have a few of of the same quirks (like I/l similarity) that the original font had. That said, Calibri is usually the default sans serif font for user documents in Microsoft programs, not Windows UI elements (you generally see Segoe UI there). It's the latter that tend to make the most specific assumptions about font dimensions, so swapping in something else for Calibri might not be much of an issue.
posted by ASF Tod und Schwerkraft at 12:46 PM on March 6, 2021
This can be a problem. You can look for fully metric-compatible fonts (e.g. Carlito for Calibri) but to preserve those metrics, they often have a few of of the same quirks (like I/l similarity) that the original font had. That said, Calibri is usually the default sans serif font for user documents in Microsoft programs, not Windows UI elements (you generally see Segoe UI there). It's the latter that tend to make the most specific assumptions about font dimensions, so swapping in something else for Calibri might not be much of an issue.
posted by ASF Tod und Schwerkraft at 12:46 PM on March 6, 2021
From what I can tell there isn't a way to do what she wants in Outlook. Uninstalling Calibri will make it impossible to compose email in the required font, and as you noted, you can only change the default font for when it isn't specified in the HTML-formatted e-mail.
If she's able to use the Outlook Web Access client, depending on what version of OWA she has available, it might have an immersive reader mode accessible via the ... menu at the top of the reading pane ([...] > View > Show in immersive reader), though this is a separate view, not the default one. You could also write some user CSS for OWA that does what you want, since it runs in a browser.
If her IT department has enabled it, it may be possible for her to use a 3rd party email client via IMAP, which could in theory have more configuration options available to customize the look of emails received.
posted by Aleyn at 6:02 PM on March 6, 2021
If she's able to use the Outlook Web Access client, depending on what version of OWA she has available, it might have an immersive reader mode accessible via the ... menu at the top of the reading pane ([...] > View > Show in immersive reader), though this is a separate view, not the default one. You could also write some user CSS for OWA that does what you want, since it runs in a browser.
If her IT department has enabled it, it may be possible for her to use a 3rd party email client via IMAP, which could in theory have more configuration options available to customize the look of emails received.
posted by Aleyn at 6:02 PM on March 6, 2021
Best answer: Rather than fully deleting Calibri (which Windows will keep putting back anyway), you can alias it, so you're still reading and producing “Calibri” but on your machine it looks like a different font. (Preferably one with reasonably-similar metrics, to avoid messing up document layouts.)
Open regedit and select the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\FontSubstitutes. Inside, create a new string (REG_SZ) value called Calibri, with the name of the substitute font as the value.
It's still a fairly extreme solution to a mail-specific problem. It's not stated what the mail client is — I'm guessing Outlook and I don't know much about Outlook, but if it's acceptable to use another client there are options:
- Thunderbird can certainly ignore fonts, though I think I had to go to the Config Editor and toggle “browser.display.use_document_fonts” to do it
- If you can run the Outlook web app then you've got the browser's font controls to do the same
posted by BobInce at 4:27 AM on March 7, 2021 [1 favorite]
Open regedit and select the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\FontSubstitutes. Inside, create a new string (REG_SZ) value called Calibri, with the name of the substitute font as the value.
It's still a fairly extreme solution to a mail-specific problem. It's not stated what the mail client is — I'm guessing Outlook and I don't know much about Outlook, but if it's acceptable to use another client there are options:
- Thunderbird can certainly ignore fonts, though I think I had to go to the Config Editor and toggle “browser.display.use_document_fonts” to do it
- If you can run the Outlook web app then you've got the browser's font controls to do the same
posted by BobInce at 4:27 AM on March 7, 2021 [1 favorite]
The newest versions of Exchange seem to be built to force people to use Outlook. However, you can use Thunderbird instead by running davmail, which basically handles the Exchange part and relays it to a local IMAP server only accessible on your computer.
posted by en forme de poire at 6:59 AM on March 7, 2021
posted by en forme de poire at 6:59 AM on March 7, 2021
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by ejs at 10:29 AM on March 6, 2021