How are my system fonts getting forcibly replaced?

May 27, 2005 10:40 PM

Recently, my G5 running 10.4.1 has had a problem where, all of a sudden, my system fonts will change to something that looks Hebrew or Arabic, rendering text unreadable. The font looks a good deal like Geeza Pro. It happens mostly in Firefox and Thunderbird, but it can affect other programs like iTunes as well. It's scary as all get-out -- if it were to be permanent, almost everything on screen that's text would be indecipherable. Has anyone else experienced/heard of this?

I usually fix it by adjusting my fonts with a program like TinkerTool and/or restarting -- but I'd like to fix the problem for good. This font hi-jack thing is scaring me. Any advice would be most helpful.

posted by mrkinla to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

It sounds to me like a system font has been deleted or disabled via the Font Book. If you have recently tried to slim down your fonts, try turning them back on; a missing system font seems to cause serious problems in Tiger according to this and that hint on macosxhints.com. The latter being about trouble with the "Font Resolve" feature in Font Book.

If you haven't opened Font Book recently, then I'm on the wrong track...
posted by istewart at 11:35 PM on May 27, 2005

there used to be this problem with web browsers on OS 10.3 that if you had the font helvetica fractions installed the web browser would use that as the default font making everything look jibberish and tiny and kind of arabic looking.

but i thought that got fixed with 10.4.

maybe you can provide a screenshot?
posted by sammich at 1:50 AM on May 28, 2005

It sounds like another font is being substituted for the system ones. For some reason, the system fonts folder is lowest in priority (apart from Classic), so if you've got a font installed in your personal fonts folder with the same name as a System one, it could be getting replaced.
posted by bonaldi at 8:43 AM on May 28, 2005

Try removing Times phonetic fonts; I had similar problems (not with the system, tho...), and that fixed 'em.
posted by dpcoffin at 10:04 AM on May 28, 2005

Create a new user profile and see if you have the same problem. That will tell you if the problem is a User font or a System font.

I know that the dfonts are ones that you really, really *want* to disable/replace with a more useful version, but don't do it. Crazy stuff happens when you do. More than you realize...
posted by glyphlet at 11:53 AM on May 28, 2005