What causes a browser to “stack” text?
Sometimes (different sites, different browsers) a website will come up and several lines of text will appear on top of each other.
It seems I knew a fix for this years ago, but now I can’t seem to craft my search text to even bring up possible resolutions in a web search.

Sometimes it has to do with the how you have the zoom level and text sizes set.

quote:

Originally posted by mark123:
Sometimes it has to do with the how you have the zoom level and text sizes set.

Thanks for the reply.
I’ve seen that issue before, first thing I checked. This is with no zoom, default text sizes.
Currently I’m seeing this with safari, Firefox and chrome. It also seems to be random. But it does seem worse on text heavy pages.

It’s just a glitch in the matrix.

Make sure your default text setting is to a system font (or null), not a third-party add on. There are many third-party fonts that are improperly designed, and this could be throwing the browser off when trying to display them. Make incremental changes in this area, and see how it affects the display of the page.

Alternatively, this could be a CSS (Content Style Sheet) issue. A CSS is instructions, part of the source of the web page, that tells the browser how to display certain content, stuff like text color, size, column width, and line spacing. It could be that the CSS for the pages in question conflicts with settings and preferences configured on your system (CSS is saying "do this" but the browser doesn't know how and falls down trying). There are extensions for some browsers that allow you to view and change CSS settings, these are usually intended to assist developers and page authors to see how their content looks under various CSS conditions so look for them in the developer section of your browser's extension library.

My Firefox has a menu item View -> Page Style -> No Style that appears to disable CSS processing. Does this make a difference in text formatting? Please do not be distracted by the huge changes otherwise, focus on the text display. My Firefox also has Tools -> Browser Tools -> Web Deeloper Tools which will show CSS data, while you're in Browser Tools also check out Browser Console, may be some messages in here regarding the mis-display of text.

Is "Reader View" an option?

It's either bit stacking, or might be packet coagulation. Not much you can do except data reduction pushing the correct value onto the stack or popping off the variable responsible.

Maybe...