Ben Ward

Gah! Mac OSX Text Render Doom!

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Right, for about a week now I’ve been having an issue in OSX whereby text is rendering very badly indeed. At random, characters are missing from blocks of text, be that in Web Pages (in Safari and Firefox) in subject lines in Mail.app, on captions on the Dock. All over. If you go back and forward in the web browser the missing characters usually re-appear.

For example, on Flickr I found that a a number of characters are missing from my ‘Recent Comments’ page, but only in the italic variant of the font.

I tried clearing my Font Cache using Linotype’s Font Explorer, which hasn’t resolved the problem. The only possible issue I can think of is that at this exact moment, I do have a a lot of fonts installed on this system. 628, in fact. I’m aware this is a lot. Before I go trawling through enabling, disabling and otherwise organising my Font Library though, can anyone confirm if that sheer number is likely to be a cause of my problem? Like most things, much as it would be pedantic and nice to organise my fonts, it’ll take ages and if it’s not actually going to fix my problem I’d rather put it off.

Shared experiences much appreciated.

Comments

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  1. Stuart Maynard-Keene

    I think having 600+ fonts installed may not help, but before you go ahead and disable all of them just mess about with turning Helvetica Neue on and off I think I recall having problems with this, worth a try!

  2. David Koontz

    I had the exact same issue, I thought I had a virus or something. Disabling Helvetica Neue via the Font Book solved the issue for me.

  3. Stef

    Maybe one step further with FontExplorer? From the Tools menu item, choose “Clean System Font Folders”. This’ll take all the non-system fonts out of ~/Library/Fonts, /Library/Fonts and /System/Library/Fonts and move them to your desktop. (And will optionally clean all the caches.) This’ll hopefully remove any typefaces that are clashing with any system fonts, so should solve the weird text display after a reboot. You can then move all the fonts from the desktop back into FontExplorer’s library.

    Might also be worth using FontExplorer’s conflict checking tools to scan for dupes, missing printer-font files, etc. while you’re at it?

  4. Paul

    Many thanks for this – I was experiencing the exact same issue and disabling Helvetica Neue via the Font Book worked!

  6. Ryan Hayden

    Hi, I have been having this problem too. Every Apple employee that I have spoken too looked at me like I had six heads. The disabling Helvetica Neue thing seemed to work. Thanks a lot.

  7. Ash

    Getting exactly the same problem funnily enough, but haven’t installed any fonts on my system at all. Strange, most problematic in adium chats where characters are just randomly dissappeared.

    I wonder what causes it?

    Anyway, I disabled that font family… will see how that goes :).

    Cheers All.
    Ash.

  8. Andy

    Most excellent advice, thank you. Disabling Helvetica Neue via Font Book fixed my missing character problem.

    Maybe Apple should fix this bug with Software Update?

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