OSX Yosemite - Font Display Problem (iMessages)

I have the same problem. The issue seems to be occurring on Retina displays only. The Messages font choice in Yosemite is extremely hard to read. Unfortunately we can't fix it either like we could in the past versions. In my screenshot, I can't read the text in the green bubble unless I'm inches from the screen.

I don't have that many fonts installed. When I launch Font Book, the Helvetica Neue font seems to display correctly. It's also used elsewhere without issue (it's the system font right?)

It almost looks like the ultra light variant of the font we're seeing in Messages.

Folks one of the first things I have done is Run FontBook.

I've found in the past each new OS X version's control of Fonts get tighter and tighter. Yosemite is the tightest so far written. It has absolutely no tolerance for duplicate fonts you'll get conflicts even with turned off fonts.

1. Restart in Safe Mode Shift key down while restart.
   Wait until progress bar disappears, and sign in. Let finishing loading.
2. Open FontBook
3. In left hand window choose All Fonts
4. Next in right hand pane click on any font
5. Next hold down ⌘ key and Press A (select - A)
6. Go to File menu and choose Validate fonts.
7. When validate fonts window pops up click on title bar and choose warnings and Errors.
8. Wait until all fonts are validated the put check mark next to every duplicate named and any defective fonts and choose remove fonts.
   Do not just turn off, remove them off.
9. Now quit Font Book
10. Pullout all the duplicate fonts on to desktop
11. Select them all.
12. Now do a zip archive and save the archive.
13. Now dump the fonts in trash again. this time emptying

Now check to see if you have the same issues.

This is one of the first things I do with each new System. Yosemite has no tolerance for even turned off duplicates. Prior OS's turned off fonts were ignored. Yosemite does not ignore them turning them off is a waste of time.

Font book has always been designed wrong fro day one. If you add a font and it happens it should overwrite or replace the old font with the latest version. Not allowed to place another copy in the system. allowing duplicates (in name but different version) causes application crashes, and invisible type in some applications (white characters are on a white background and other maladies.

THANKS!!!! This fixed my problem!

Yes but it is very powerful and somewhat dangerous if you don't pay attention.

Go FontBook and there is a Command called Restore system fonts.

However: it removes all fonts from everywhere in the Trash and then restores fonts from system install.

You must open up Trash and and remove any fonts to a blank folder then reinstall fonts as needed.

What its is should do is simply remove only Fonts installed by system then restore from system install and over-write (replace fonts in the system) with the newer versions.

Fontbook should never ever allow older version of Fonts be added to fontbook and all versions should be replaced with mos current versions available. Evidently its not easy to do this.

Hey All-

I also had this problem. I'm a graphic designer with LOTS of fonts that I open and close throughout the workday. Because, as mentioned above, Helvetica is the default display font, when I opened Helvetica Neue, it used the light version of that font as the iMessage display. So I deactivated the font... and it corrected itself. Pain in the rear for sure, but at least I can open and close that specific font to work around the problem.

Thanks all! This thread was my muse to correct the problem.

Cheers 🙂

There are some good points in pjonesCET1's posts, but some things are way off base.

1) It is literally impossible for a font that has been disabled to conflict with another font that is enabled. The conflict occurs in RAM. And that can only happen if the conflicting fonts are both active.

2) The Restore Fonts feature in Font Book does not remove fonts "from everywhere". It removes fonts not installed by OS X from the /System/Library/Fonts/ folder, and the /Library/Fonts/ folder. Any fonts in your user account aren't touched. The other thing it does is restore fonts installed by OS X that are missing from those same two folders. And that is limited to the supplied fonts that exist in the hidden Recovery partition, of which there aren't all that many. So if you've deleted any supplied fonts that don't exist in the Recovery partition, they won't come back.

3) There's no reason whatsoever why you can't use older fonts. I have thousands of Mac/Windows fonts going back to OS 8 which vary between Mac legacy TrueType (OS 9 and earlier), piles of Type 1 PostScript fonts (both Mac and Windows versions), Apple .dfonts, OpenType PostScript fonts and OpenType Truetype fonts. I even have lots of ancient TrueType .ttf fonts purchased for Windows 3.1 when that was a new OS. They all work just fine in OS X.

What you're likely experiencing more than anything else is corrupt font cache data. Some of which can be cache data that isn't actually corrupt, but is confusing the OS with a mix of third party and OS supplied Helvetica fonts that were both active at one time or another. The OS doesn't always see that the cache data is not from the currently active Helvetica fonts. So step one is to make sure all third party Helvetica fonts are disabled. Then do the following.

Close all running applications. From an administrator account, open the Terminal app and enter the following command. You can also copy/paste it from here into the Terminal window:

sudo atsutil databases -remove

Terminal will then ask for your admin password. As you type, it will not show anything, so be sure to enter it correctly.

This command removes all font cache files. Both for the system and the current logged in user account. After running the command, close Terminal and immediately restart your Mac.

Now check your display.