Odd fonts displaying? Use Font Book

When applications display content in odd fonts that have not been assigned to them, often this is caused by font corruption, duplication, or other problem with the individual fonts installed on the system.

Apple Discussion poster "herbmstrs" writes:

"I started having parts of web pages and emails coming up in a runic font I have on my computer. I deleted it because it started this - but it hasn't gone away. I figured out how to view my emails in last alternative version, but how can I change my safari pages to be able to see them in english - kind of hard to read in runic and not be able to convert in my head Not sure what happened or how to fix and prevent in future. Tried everything I can think of but no luck. And not all pages or emails come up in that font - and on some pages jsut part of it mixed with English titles."

When errors such as this occur, you may think about removing the application's preference files and other resource files the application may use for running to tackle the problem. In addition to or instead of this, try running Font Book's font verification routine on all your fonts, and remove any fonts that are showing problems. Even if there are errors in fonts other than the ones you are using, you can have problems with fonts displaying improperly in certain applications. We've mentioned this in previous articles about gibberish or incoherent text displaying in applications, but it is also relevant when the wrong font is displayed but the text appears properly.

The system has font locations in the global library (for all users), the system library (core system fonts, which should not be changed), in addition to those in an individual's user library. As such, some users on the system can have font problems while others do not, depending on what they've installed in their libraries. Running font verification in each affected account will pinpoint font problems that might be involved.

Solution: Run Font verification

Open Font Book (in the Utilities folder) and highlight the "All Fonts" collection. Then in the "Font" column, select a font and press command-A to select all fonts. Then choose "Validate Fonts..." from the "File" menu and a window should open that checks all the selected fonts. If any have errors, check them, and click the "Remove Checked" button. After this is done, relaunching the affected program or restarting the computer should clear the font problem if font errors are the cause.

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