Mattuch’s Blog

I’ve been having a not so fun font conflict.

The fonts in Safari, Firefox and many other applications are a garbled mess.

After upgrading to Firefox 3 garbled looking fonts were becoming a huge nuisance. Then Safari started acting up. I knew it had to be one of the 3,000 fonts loaded into my system.

Solutions:
1. Manage conflicts, duplicates & corruptions in Font Book or similar application like FontExplorerX (Freeware).

2. For garbled text, the most common cause is corrupt font caches. Try emptying the font cache – use a program like Tweak Freak for 10.4 or Onyx for 10.5 (Both are Freeware)

3. Helvetica Fractions in particular are known to cause problems, as is Times Phonetic. Don’t just disable these fonts in Font Book, but physically remove & delete them from your system and try your applications again.

Removing the non-system Helveticas fixed my Safari. Then removing & Deleting Times Phonetic fixed Firefox 3. WoooHoo!

If this post has helped you, leave a comment. Thanks!

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Filed under: Tips & Tricks on August 9th, 2008