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A jarring font substitution

May 21, 2025 at 12:28 PM by Dr. Drang

I opened this article in Apple News+ this morning to see if, as I suspected, it was Long COVID that kept Kristaps Porziņģis from playing as much as usual during the NBA playoffs. It wasn’t, but before I even got into the story, I was taken aback by the headline.

Headline in Apple News

Not by the words in the headline, but by those two accented letters in his last name. They’re obviously not the same font as the rest of the letters—they’re not even seriffed. And whatever font they are (Helvetica, I believe), that font has a distinctly larger x-height than the font used in the rest of the headline, making the difference even more prominent.

I went to The Athletic’s website to look at the article there, and saw basically the same thing, but here at least, the two accented characters were seriffed. Still looked bigger than the surrounding text, though.

Headline on Athletic website

Here, the accented characters are almost certainly Georgia.

This unfortunate jump in font design and size is the result of font substitution. Whatever font The Athletic is using for its headline does not have those two characters—an n-cedilla and a g-cedilla—which are part of the Latvian alphabet (Porziņģis is Latvian). On Apple News+, the fallback font is Helvetica; on the web, it’s Georgia.

To see what font is being used for the rest of the headline, I went to WhatTheFont and uploaded an image of the headline with the accented characters removed. Many of its results were for some form of Cheltenham, which makes sense for two reasons:

  1. The New York Times, The Athletic’s parent, uses a Cheltenham variant for its headlines.

  2. The page source of the article includes a handful of references to “nyt-cheltenham” in its <style> section, like this:

    .article-content-container > h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 {
  line-height: 1.2;
  font-family: nyt-cheltenham, georgia, 'times new roman', times;
}

    Which also explains why the substitute font on the web is Georgia.

So the NYT didn’t pay enough to get a full set of characters and Porziņģis’s name looks goofy in headlines. I’d say this was an obvious conspiracy by a bunch of Knick fans, but Porziņģis used to play for the Knicks.

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