Josue Menjivar

Q: OSX 10.7 Safari 5.1 font rendering problem

I'm getting capital letter A's instead of text in Safari 5.1 in Lion. Only on certain site. Anyone out there know what is happening?

iMac, Mac OS X (10.7), 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo 6 GB ram

Posted on Jul 20, 2011 4:46 PM

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Q: OSX 10.7 Safari 5.1 font rendering problem

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  • by rdxl9a,

    rdxl9a rdxl9a Jul 29, 2011 8:20 AM in response to Josue Menjivar
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Jul 29, 2011 8:20 AM in response to Josue Menjivar

    I upgraded to Lion and had the same garbeled font issue in Safari.

    I use Fontexplorer Pro. I went in an removed Arial TTF and enabled Arial OTF and it fixed it all for me.

  • by lisaroser,

    lisaroser lisaroser Jul 30, 2011 1:08 PM in response to phams
    Level 1 (16 points)
    Mac OS X
    Jul 30, 2011 1:08 PM in response to phams

    phams wrote:

     

    Hi - Had the same problem - I have Suitcase Fusion 2 on the computer and it's "font vault" was messing the browser up. To turn it off I went to System Prefs > Suitcase Fusion Core - unchecked "start Suitcase Fusion 2 Core at Log-in" and turned off the Suitcase Fusion 2 Core - Then restarted. All seems fine now (now just waiting for Suitcase to update their program...)

     

    Phams- now that you turned off Suitacse Fusion 2, which is what I am using, did you re-install everything into Font Book? I am having same 'A'-in-a-box issue with only Safari. Tried the Onyx fix and it did work but only on some pages. Checked for duplicates in both FontBook & Suitcase no duplicates.

     

    Thanks!

    AppleLisa Rose

     

  • by glhg,Helpful

    glhg glhg Aug 2, 2011 9:53 AM in response to Josue Menjivar
    Level 1 (5 points)
    Aug 2, 2011 9:53 AM in response to Josue Menjivar

    Solution for FONTEXPLORER X

     

    Following the solution by Eric http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dW9aHlOIJUg, I just followed his instruction and adapt it for FontExplorer X.

    You just need to edit the com.apple.WebProcess.sb you can find here:

    System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/WebKit2.framework/WebProcess/Contents/Resources /com.apple.WebProcess.sb

     

    Within TextEdit, just add these 3 lines before (home-subpath "/Library/Fonts"):

    (home-subpath "/FontExplorer X")

    (home-subpath "/FontExplorer X/Font Library")

    (subpath "/FontExplorer X/Font Library")

     

    Save it and restart Safari. It will solve the issue. It worked for me.

  • by Josue Menjivar,

    Josue Menjivar Josue Menjivar Aug 2, 2011 1:49 PM in response to glhg
    Level 1 (39 points)
    iOS Apps
    Aug 2, 2011 1:49 PM in response to glhg

    I'm the original poster of this bug. I tried the suggestion and link provided by glhg and it worked!! Thanks so much. I was just going to wait until Apple figured it out, but it was really driving me crazy.

    Thank you. I actually use FontAgent Pro so the video was very helpful!!

  • by Adrian Jean,

    Adrian Jean Adrian Jean Aug 2, 2011 6:09 PM in response to Josue Menjivar
    Level 1 (15 points)
    Aug 2, 2011 6:09 PM in response to Josue Menjivar

    If (like me) you chose not to have your favourite font manager manage the actual font files, and you save your fonts in a custom directory, then you need to adjust your code.

     

    For example I have my font files in the following location (~ means your home folder):

     

    ~/Documents/Fonts

     

    So the code I need to put into my com.apple.WebProcess.sb  file will look like this:

     

           (home-subpath "/Documents/Fonts")

           (subpath "/Documents/Fonts")

     

    The paths are relative to the user's home directory. So if your font files are located at:

     

    ~/Fonts

     

    Then your lines of code should be this:

     

           (home-subpath "/Fonts")

           (subpath "/Fonts")

     

    As always back-up often.

    Good luck.

  • by BTRI,

    BTRI BTRI Aug 3, 2011 6:58 AM in response to glhg
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Aug 3, 2011 6:58 AM in response to glhg

    Thanks, this is the only route that seems to have fixed it for me (using folder paths for FontAgent Pro's folders). Why the heck did Apple knowingly release Safari v5.1 in this state, though? (The comment line just above the folder path lines seems to acknowledge an issue.) It seems to be affecting many people, judging by the # of people who happen to bother to post here, yet other Apple apps and other browsers are fine in OS X 10.7.

  • by nathanhornby,

    nathanhornby nathanhornby Aug 3, 2011 7:13 AM in response to BTRI
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Aug 3, 2011 7:13 AM in response to BTRI

    This fix seems to have just borked my Safari

     

    When I stick in a URL it just kind of hangs there, at about 10% loaded, doesn't do any more.  Maybe I did something wrong.  I'll go check.

     

     

    However I STILL fail to realise how this could fix my problem.

     

    The fonts that don't load for me are NOT local, they're web-fonts (@font-face specifically) and so the font path should be irrelivant.

     

    I have the issue with fonts I have locally, and ones that I don't; the only common link is that they're webfonts.  I haven't seen the issue with websafe fonts such as Arial, Helvetica etc. they all work fine.

     

    I still suspect the problem is much bigger than adding an extra path to a preferences file, otherwise Apple would have issued that fix already - they're all over WebKit, HTML5 and CSS3 - to release a version of Safari that destroys type on the web would be something they'd be keen on fixing pretty sharpish I'd have thought.

     

    I suspect the problem has variations.

  • by nathanhornby,

    nathanhornby nathanhornby Aug 3, 2011 7:17 AM in response to nathanhornby
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Aug 3, 2011 7:17 AM in response to nathanhornby

    I take it back, the fix worked, Apple is officially ridiculous.

     

    How on earth does the local font path affect loading an external font that isn't even in my local library?

     

    And if the fix is so simple then issue the fix already Apple.

     

    I suppose that really we shouldn't be angry, we should all just use another browser and let Apple get their **** together.

  • by Jeremy Bohn,

    Jeremy Bohn Jeremy Bohn Aug 3, 2011 10:35 AM in response to nathanhornby
    Level 2 (313 points)
    Aug 3, 2011 10:35 AM in response to nathanhornby

    nathanhornby wrote:

     

    This fix seems to have just borked my Safari

     

    When I stick in a URL it just kind of hangs there, at about 10% loaded, doesn't do any more.  Maybe I did something wrong.  I'll go check.

     

    This happaned to me too because I made a typo in editing that file.

  • by Thewickedgrape,

    Thewickedgrape Thewickedgrape Aug 5, 2011 8:10 AM in response to glhg
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Aug 5, 2011 8:10 AM in response to glhg

    This fixed it for me, too. Thank you!

  • by jenscott1205,

    jenscott1205 jenscott1205 Aug 7, 2011 4:49 AM in response to Josue Menjivar
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Aug 7, 2011 4:49 AM in response to Josue Menjivar

    I've been dealing with the same problem.... After reading this thread, I went into Font Book and disabled Arial, Trebuchet and Verdana. This seems to have fixed the problem for me for the time being. Hopefully Apple will release an update soon, very disappointing....

  • by lisaroser,

    lisaroser lisaroser Aug 7, 2011 12:13 PM in response to Tim Mackey
    Level 1 (16 points)
    Mac OS X
    Aug 7, 2011 12:13 PM in response to Tim Mackey

    Tim Mackey wrote:

     

    So, it looks like tobystokes was right, it is a sandboxing issue. See here for a description of the problem:

    https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3191320?start=30&tstart=0#15718224

     

    and the solution:

    https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3191320?start=30&tstart=0#15718511

     

    The solution presented by robert_tx in the discussion I linked to solved the whole problem immediately.

    Also, Lucas-G. His solution worked for me, in the same thread.

    https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3191320?start=60&tstart=0

     

    In face, adding this reply from Safari! Good luck and don't give up!!!

     

  • by TomasAndrle,

    TomasAndrle TomasAndrle Aug 10, 2011 4:11 AM in response to Josue Menjivar
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Aug 10, 2011 4:11 AM in response to Josue Menjivar

    I tried cleaning the font cache - didn't work.

    I tried setting different default fonts in Safari - didn't work.

    There were no reported duplicate font conflicts in Font Book.

     

    Finally I solved this by:

     

    1. Exporting all User fonts from Font Book.

    2. Restoring default fonts using Font Book.

    3. Dragging the exported fonts folder back to Font Book. Skipped fonts with errors in the install dialog.

     

     

    I have a clean install of Lion (not a SL upgrade) but my User folder was copied from an older system, Safari 5.1

  • by ScottRichardson,

    ScottRichardson ScottRichardson Aug 16, 2011 4:51 PM in response to nathanhornby
    Level 1 (1 points)
    Aug 16, 2011 4:51 PM in response to nathanhornby

    Nathanhornby, Most 'well-written' @font-face code will first attempt to load a local copy of the font, rather than downloading the online copy, in an attempt to save on bandwidth/load times. It appears that if you DO have the font that the @font-face rule is using, AND you're runninng a font manager with a custom directory for the fonts, then it causes the dreaded [A]'s everywhere. I run FontCase from Bohemian Software and I am about to try your fix but I have a suspicion it won't work since the fonts are located inside a package/vault file.

  • by ScottRichardson,

    ScottRichardson ScottRichardson Aug 16, 2011 5:20 PM in response to ScottRichardson
    Level 1 (1 points)
    Aug 16, 2011 5:20 PM in response to ScottRichardson

    Can confirm that I have fixed the issue for anyone using Fontcase. I simply added the correct line of code to the file and it worked.

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