<b>Menu text vanishes in Mac OS 8; the cause and solution

One day, Catherine Kunicki found that all of the text in the Mac OS 8 Finder menus of her Mac had vanished. Since she had just recently installed the Fractal Painter 5.0.3 Updater, she called MetaCreations Technical Support for help.

They said that this is a known general problem. It happens if an application somehow corrupts the Charcoal font used by the menus. A work-around is to to go the Appearance control panel and set the System font to Chicago. Then restart the Mac. Catherine tried it and her menus returned. Reinstalling a fresh copy of the Charcoal font should also work.

MetaCreations adds: "This issue actually has nothing to do with Painter, however it shows up after use of Painter. The Charcoal font has been modified and corrupted by another application. Using it makes the whole system unstable."