Confluence font on linux machines is serif rather than sans serif

Question

Our company Confluence page displays in a sans serif font when on a Mac or Windows machine. However, I'm running Ubuntu 18 and our Confluence pages display in a serif font, both in Firefox and Chromium. Does anyone know how to change this? Is this controlled by the System Administrator?

Cameron Bieganek · Answer

I think the real problem here is that the default CSS font styles for Linux are as follows:

body {
font-family: Tahoma, "Times New Roman", serif;
font-size: 14px;
}

Since Linux environments don't come with Microsoft fonts, Confluence pages end up using Times New Roman or another serif font. I think something like the following would make more sense:

body {
font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif;
font-size: 14px;
}

As a workaround, you can install the Tahoma fonts on you Linux system. This is what I did, and now Confluence looks much better.

Note: I know almost nothing about web development. I found the above CSS in a "custom.css" file when inspecting the style sheets for our Confluence page. Perhaps the "custom.css" file was actually created by our system administrator?

David Yu · Answer

Newer editions with the updated look / feel of Jira Confluence now have a preference to OS system fonts (from looking at the CSS styles).

You can change your Confluence fonts globally with some custom HTML as described here:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/styling-confluence-with-css-166528400.html

A specific example is here: https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/styling-fonts-in-confluence-174751968.html