Wonky, messed up text in internet browser

Go to the Safari menu and select Preferences. Click on "Appearance" and then verify that the font choices are still the default shown below:

Standard font: Times 16
Fixed width font:" Courier 13

I assure you this is not OS related. I had this happen to me on 10.4 iMac. It is always (because it's recurrent) due to somehow having a duplicate Times New Roman font (for me) file somewhere. It is my standard font in that computer's Safari prefs. It may help you to figure out what font it's supposed to be. It looks like Arial is what I display on googles, so maybe your issue is with that particular font if it's in all browsers.

I'm no expert on this stuff, but it seems like some third-party apps have their own fonts that get dropped into the fonts folder on install, and also some fonts you may download from the web might have been built by altering an existing font. I think these types of hobbled together fonts somehow confuse the computer to "misdirect" a call for the original font to the newly installed font.

Fix: Check your libraries for duplicates. If you have more than one of any font, whittle it down to one (generally the oldest). If that doesn't help, look in Fontbook and disable/resolve/remove any duplicate that shows up. Make sure you don't remove any fonts that are necessary from the systems library folder. Before doing anything drastic, you may want to clear your font cache. You can do this several ways, including using Font Doctor or another third-party app. I have had to resort to removing the entire user font library and adding back one-by-one until I figure out which file is causing chaos. I hope you don't have to do that. You definitely have a corrupted font, and it is probably in your user library. Good luck!

EDIT: I forgot to tell you to restart. 😉

Message was edited by: snowsister