OSX 10.7 Safari 5.1 font rendering problem

Not entirely fixed per se, but at least I did find some very strange behaviour. I found another site that displayed the "A boxes". I copy/pasted the text into TextEdit, which displayed the font as Myriad Pro Black. In FontExplorer, I de-activated all Myriad fonts, and re-launced Safari. The text was then displaying — but now as Helvetica! Not entirely sure, but it looks like Helvetica is the font that should be displayed on that site (and doesn't seem to be a webfont service sending Myriad with the page). I can read the site, but turning off fonts is going to get old real quick!

So that's a glitch that's definitively not simply a question of Safari being unhappy with a different copy of a font.

I have 10.7 running on a MacBook Pro and am using FontExplorer Pro 3.0. Restarting, cache clearing, fixing duplicates, turning off fonts, clearing cache with Onyx, FEP and from the Terminal all are temporary fixes. The problem comes back after a few Safari restarts or Computer restarts. TUAW and Dropbox continually display the LastResort font with the boxed A's.

Firefox displays all websites correctly.

I had the same problem. Hopefully I have fixed it. It is all about duplicate fonts. Sometimes even, if there was no problem in Snow Leopard, and if the font names in the same directory are not identical (but the same font name to get known by the system). In my case it was mainly about Gill Sans (.ttf vs .ttc) and Rotis (two different versions. But it may be other fonts in your case.

After a few early success and return of the problem battles, I recognized, the problem came back everytime, fontexplorer pro had loaded some duplicate fonts.

The good news (at least in my case) you don't need to clear font cache and restart over and over.

After deleting the duplicate, Safari changed from A's to letters.

So the hunt for duplicates was the right answer. Don't give up. Good luck!

I have found the following:

This happens when using a Font Manager. I use FontAgent Pro. When the fonts were in the original folder, /Library/Fonts, there was no rendering problem.

It appears to be the Microsoft fonts that are the issue: Arial, Verdana, Georgia, Times New Roman, Trebuchet, perhaps others.

The errors only occur in Safari, no other browser (so far).

Turning off auto-activation and deactivating these fonts appears to "cure" the problem. No need to reset font caches, the pages literally transform as the fonts are turned on and off. However, so pages render correctly or at least as the authors intended, putting these fonts back into the orignal font folder seems to work okay.

It seems that what I have discovered is this problem has nothing to do with duplicates, chache cleaning, Font Managers or restarts, but Safari's inability to handle OpenType (PostScript Flavored). Turn off fonts in that format and the problem goes away. Because this is not a problem for Firefox it leads me to believe there is something wrong with Safari.

Strange problem.

I have lots of OTF fonts and Safari 5.1 has never had problems.

This is one fascinating/tough issue.

Thanks ... Ken

I have found a solution that works for me. Here is what I did, in hope that it might help others...

1. I checked out the code for websites where I was seeing this problem. In my case the only times I was seeing this "A" problem was sections of websites where "Myriad Pro" had been specified as the first font in the font stack.

2. On my system, I have both Adobe Creative Suite, which includes Myriad Pro, as well as Adobe Font Folio, which also includes this font. While the version in Adobe Font Folio is managed by my font manager, Font Agent Pro, the other version had been installed by Adobe CS into my /Library/Fonts folder.

3. In the /Library/Fonts folder, I deleted all the fonts with the same creation date, which were all the fonts that Adobe CS put there. I left the other versions of this font alone, managed by Font Agent Pro.

4. The problem immediately dissappeared. So I went into Font Agent Pro, and activated the Myriad font. The problem immediately re-appeared upon activation, and dissappeared upone deactivation.

So practically speaking, this fixes the problem in seeing the "A" problem, while clearly it does not solve whatever the underlying issue is. If anyone can figure out the underlying issue, please let me know.

cheers,

-Adam

I had the same problem and literally just fixed it by doing this...

Downloaded the beta of Cocktail for Lion, ran the font cache clearing thing and rebooted, problem gone.

It could also have to do with the font juggling I did, but I'd never bet able to tell you what made it work 100%. I pared down the fonts installed by the OS (I still don't get why Apple puts fonts in 2 places) and the rest are in FontAgentPro.

I too noticed that it doesn't happen in Firefox.

Hey everyone, As far as I can tell the issue is what Netcrawler said it was. Here's how I found my solution:

I was using Fontcase. I'm sure any Font Manager is the same...

1. I activated all of my fonts (ouch!) in Fontcase - The 'boxed As' came up on a page.

2. I deactivated all of my fonts - Immediately the page was rendered properly.

3. I activated everything again. I got the boxed As again. I opened "Font Book" and ran the validation check on all the fonts in there.

4. Font Book showed duplication errors when all of my fonts in Fontcase were activated.

5. Since I don't need two copies of these system fonts, I removed the ones in Fontcase and left the ones in Font Book.

6. When I removed/deactivated the 'Verdana' font from Fontcase, the page rendered perfect.

I would imagine this carries through for any other fonts that may be having duplication errors (boxed As) - depending on what font the specific web page is calling for. Just don't have the same font in your font manager as is already a default system font.

I supposed you might be able to deactivate the fonts in Font Book rather than removing/deactivating them in your font manager, but I didn't try that as I don't know if OS X will auto activate later and the problem will come back.

In any case: Problem solved! Hope this helps.

Thomas

YIKES: I spoke too soon. Just rebooted and the problem is back.

Just a note guys, so you stop running down the wrong rabbit hole…

I also have this issue, but the primary issue isn't your local font library, it's mostly occuring with @font-face text replacement on websites that use non-standard fonts - in particular Google's Font API.

So that Apple aren't sent looking in the wrong direction, check out @font-face rendering, and how Safari is interacting with local/remote fonts.

Fairly sure it's a sandboxing issue: see https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3191320?start=45&tstart=0

This will occur if you are using fonts outside of the normal place they live, ie a /Library/Fonts folder, which most font mangers do.

I'm using FontExplorer and I have this problem too with Safari and Chrome (it seems only affects WebKit browsers) and I just realized it today, so I went spending a great deal of time to fix this. The only ones that are problematic with me are apparently Aller Bold Italic and Droid Sans/Serif, and I've tried every combination of fix that's available in this thread with no result.

However, I finally tried deactivating those fonts in Explorer, and install them manually to Font Book. I know this isn't an elegant fix, but it works for me, at least for now. I hope this could be an alternative fix for you guys.