Update: I've also fixed the text resize options (the 4 A's) where in the past, it did not resize the text font size whenever the author had already set a specific size. You should now be able to resize text no matter what.

Final Update: I switched Calibri to Verdana on Windows since it wasn't working for half the people. I'm not a big fan of Verdana myself. It's nowhere near as nice to look at as Lucida Grande on Macs but it's also one of the most easy to read fonts available on Windows.

As for people complaining about their broken layouts, as I've already explained in my post below, just do a select all on your layout in the toolbar, change the font to "Helvetica", and you're fixed! If you're having problems with line height, the original line height was "1.5". The current line height is "1.5em". Don't complicate your lives by fiddling with the margins.

For a lot of you, the second part is bad news so I'm going to start with the good news.

I added some new fonts to your editor toolbars (refresh your browser cache if you don't have 23 fonts in your toolbar). Lucida Grande works very well for people with Macs and I have Calibri for people with Windows. Helvetica Nueue is one of the most readable online fonts that works for both systems and I've also added a new Droid Serif font that works on any device and is great for mobiles (not yet installed but available on the toolbar now).

And with that said, I'm also going to announce a slight change to AFF before I actually release it, for once. I'm changing the default AFF font from "Helvetica" to "Lucida Grande" on Macs, "Verdana" on Windows, "Ubuntu" on Ubuntu, and everything falls back to "Helvetica Neue" if all of those fail. The reason for this is that I've come to know that many AFF users with vision problems have issues with being able to read a lot of the text on AFF. They try hard anyway, perseverant users that they are, but I want to help. So I'm changing the default fonts to fonts specifically made for reading on the web. This will make AFF look different to many of you and unfortunately, some stories with complicated layouts will probably break UNLESS you had set your font to something specific already. If it does break, just set your font in your layout to "Helvetica" to go back to the previous default font. I'm writing this blog post specifically for the layout creators since I know some of your designs will break. I'll make it up to you at some point. I'm thinking of making an official layout marketplace section here on AFF if any of you are interested.

With helping users with vision problems in mind, an included update will also be improving the "Reader Mode" button. What it does now is that it strips all html tags from a post but it ends up breaking a lot of stuff in the story like the layouts and whatnot. The new readability mode will simply make four changes: fonts are set to default readable site fonts, font size will be defaulted to 14px, background color will be white, and text color will be black. A reader can turn this feature on and off at any time, just like the previous reader mode button. I know a few layouts go a bit overboard but designers just have to remember that some people have a lot of trouble reading the actual content in some of the more elaborate designs. A design may look pretty but if a visitor can't read your story, it's going to be pretty hard to convince people to keep reading your stuff. Hopefully, the new readability mode will save both the reader and the author and help stories with difficult to read text gain more subscribers who may have initially been turned off by an unreadable design.

Mobile users using the mobile version of the site are most likely not even going to notice these changes since they'll continue to use the default "Helvetica Neue" font.

I'm going to be rolling out this change very soon after this blog post has been seen by a sufficient number of people. I know I'll also get a ton of messages asking me to change it back but I'm not changing back! I don't make these changes lightly especially when I know a lot of people will be against it so for me to change it would mean that it's pretty important. Come on, we're helping out the vision impaired here! Gotta work with me a little. Besides, too much has changed for me to be able to go back anyway even if I wanted to. But I will listen to the people who have constructive suggestions to make and there are many of you that I consider very good at that so I'm counting on those people to also help me tweak things I might have missed.

Lastly, I just might even give new preference options to let people change their default fonts and sizes themselves making everything I just said above, moot and I just wrote a lot of text for nothing.