OMG! My Viz looked different on Windows!

A portrait of a young man made during a fun session of portrait practice in very odd lighting.
Photo by Timothy Dykes / Unsplash

Last Friday, I noticed that the font in the view of my first application looked different when I viewed it with the company laptop. Then I realized that this had something to do with the built-in fonts of the various operating systems (since my applications were created using my Macbook).  I did a little reading on how fonts are displayed in Tableau, and these are my key takeaways:


1. Use Tableau font family or web-safe fonts

For a font to work when published to Server, Online or Public, it must exist on all systems where the viz will be authored or viewed. Since different OS (Windows, Mac OS, Linux, etc) have different built-in fonts, it is safer to choose common fonts that exist in most of the OS for example: Arial, Times New Roman, and Courier New (a good list for reference )


The 100% safe font is the Tableau family because these fonts are included in all Tableau software and is automatically downloaded and made available in the browser's cache before a viz is rendered if the Tableau font doesn't already exist on the computer (when the users do not have Tableau Desktop)

2. Make a Font web-safe

By installing a font on Tableau Server and all desktop computers within the company but this is kind of an in-house solution and requires certain amount of coordination or oversee within the company. This is also not applicable to workbook published to Tableau Public.  

3. Create an image of the text

This is a simple and quick hack that can 'resolves' the rendering limitation if you're not using Tableau Server / working on Tableau Public . So I decided to make an image out of the built-in font with my Mac and republished the workbook and now I can have the look I wanted for my first application on Windows!

My viz looks alright on Windows now!

Author:
Jia Yan Ng
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