Help with Lucida Sans Typewriter errors in OS X High Sierra terminal?

November 17, 2018 11:24 AM

For over a decade I have been using Lucida Sans Typewriter (LST) as the terminal font in Mac OS X and now all other fonts look weird to me. I recently upgraded to High Sierra and when I try to change the terminal font, LST looks entirely messed up. It has additional spaces between each character and the characters don't seem to be LST, but perhaps Monaco? I'm at a loss as to how to get it to work. Any suggestions?

The font came with an old installation of Microsoft Office and has worked fine for each OS upgrade until now. LST works in all other applications I have tried and it validates correctly in the FontBook app. Things I have tried: copying the font from ~/Library/Fonts to /Library/Fonts; making sure permission were all readable; rebuilding the font cache.

posted by procrastination to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

Can you share a screenshot of the issue?
posted by pmdboi at 2:12 PM on November 17, 2018

Response by poster: Absolutely - this is the link.
posted by procrastination at 2:38 PM on November 17, 2018

Response by poster: Well, this may be unsolvable. I have found others asking the same question over the years with no real answers:

Problem with font in terminal.app

Weird Terminal Font Rendering
posted by procrastination at 7:58 PM on November 17, 2018

Hmm. I downloaded a free copy of Lucida Sans Typewriter Regular from fontsgeek.com and it works ok in Terminal for me. I'm running Mojave, though, so not a perfect comparison to your situation. I don't know if that's a legit copy of LST that fontsgeek is serving up, or a lookalike, but you might see if it works for you.
posted by mumkin at 9:20 PM on November 17, 2018

I think something is wrong with that font, basically. Maybe it lacks hinting, or something about the hinting / kerning is corrupt, and Terminal is trying to do something with it that other apps don't. (I can't quite figure out why that is, though. Maybe it's a codepage / Unicode issue. I'm just guessing at this point.)

Anyway, I would try to source another copy of LST from a reputable foundry (or fontsgeek, whatever) and see if that acts any differently.

I don't have LST on my system but I just tried a variety of monospaced fonts and can't replicate the behavior with any of them, which makes me think that something is up with that font in particular. Hopefully it's just your copy. Otherwise, maybe you can search around for a similar replacement font—there are a lot of lookalikes now to the Microsoft fonts (for licensing reasons) that are quite good.
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:36 PM on November 18, 2018

Sorry, this isn't an answer, just more data points to help you narrow down the problem. I have HIgh Sierra and Lucida Sans Typewriter, and it looks fine in Terminal.app for me. There is a character spacing option when you choose the font in Terminal prefs - does that help? The links you provided seem to indicate that OpenType fonts have problems. The LST files that I have are TrueType format.
posted by bluefly at 6:10 AM on November 19, 2018

Response by poster: Thanks for all the answers. I am still at a loss. I copied my version of LST to a new High Sierra install on another mac and it worked just fine there so it apparently isn't the font version.

I also tested a bunch of other fonts on the mac that isn't working and some exhibit the same problem, including Helvetica and some random others that I don't know where they come from. It is more than just the character spacing - the typeface itself is wrong and the same wrong typeface appears for each member of the Lucida family. My fonts are also TrueType - I think one link was unclear if they had TTF problems or OTF.

If there was some way to examine the non-working fonts I could try and categorize the differences, but they all validate correctly so I don't know what the difference would be.
posted by procrastination at 3:36 PM on November 19, 2018

I did have a rendering problem with Helvetica and some other fonts when I upgraded to High Sierra. I did an "in-place" upgrade, not a clean install. I read this page which is a deep dive into macOS fonts, and it indirectly helped me figure out my problem. (For me, the font was installed in different formats in different macOS versions, and the upgrade may not have completed successfully which muddled things even though Font Book didn't complain). Maybe something there may help you? Good Luck!
posted by bluefly at 8:30 AM on November 22, 2018