I’m currently running Ubuntu 12.04 as my main operating system, and primarily use Google Chrome for Web browsing. (The “About Chrome” page says it’s version 32.0.1700.107.) I haven’t added any goofy font-management packages — or goofy fonts, for that matter. And I’d never noticed any problems with the same setup on my older computer, replaced last summer: same OS, same browser.

For the record: Chrome under Windows did not display the same problematic behavior.

But on this computer, oy. On certain pages, particularly Wikipedia pages, I could see a very vexing problem. (The problem occurred only with Chrome, not with Firefox or Opera.) To illustrate, here’s a partial screen capture of a current Wikipedia article as I saw it when I first browsed there a little while ago (click to enlarge); the red ellipses highlight problematic areas on the screen:

As you can see, especially (but not only) on lines containing boldface text, adjacent characters — sometimes entire words — appeared to overlap. I could sorta-kinda read this text, but it was getting very, very tiresome to puzzle it out when I was really in a hurry to get to a page’s content without having to fight its form.

I did some research, saw that others had experienced the same problem, but the specific solutions proposed (often involving the installation of new software and/or fonts) didn’t interest or even apply to me. Yet the focus on fonts did…

Short answer:

• In Chrome, go to the Settings page and click on the Show advanced settings… link at the bottom.
• Scroll down to the section headed Web content. Click on the Customize fonts… button.
• Look at the default sans-serif font. Does it say Arial? If so, use the drop-down list to change it to one of the generic substitutes; I picked FreeSans.
• Reload the problematic Web page.

At least in my case, the improvement was immediate (click to enlarge):

I can’t promise you identical results if you’ve got a similar problem. This one just worked for me.

And now, at last: back to researching minor planets, Chthonian planets, hot Jupiters, trojan planets, Lagrangian points, and yes, planetary cores…