Fonts go missing after upgrade to Catalina

Interesting. I am not having any issues with Apple fonts. The issues are only with third party fonts.

An update: downloading a fresh copy of the fonts, deleting the old one and importing the new font has fixed the problems for me. Pages now sees and displays the font. I am using FontExplorer 7 as a font manager for importing.

Doesn’t seem to be an IWork issue as Affinity Publisher has the same difficulty seeing the fonts.

Pages is helpful in finding these bad fonts. When you scroll down the WYSIWYG list you can see gaps where fonts cannot be displayed. Select the gap and Pages tells you (in the inspector) what font it is.

If you select the blank text in the field does Keynote tell you what font it is? On my Mac Pages would say the name of the font even though it was not displaying. Reinstalling the font brought it back.

I went down the entire font list and wrote down each font that was blank. Have been reinstalling each of them. This is a pain for sure but it brought back each font back.

These are the fonts that did not show until I deleted the old files and reinstalled fresh copies from the web. They were all True Type fonts. No problems with any OTF fonts. Buckingham is the only one that is still acting strange and I may just delete it.

Braganza ITC/braganza_itc1.ttf

Buckingham.ttf

Cathedral/Cathedra.ttf"

Cathedral Regular.ttf"

Cathedral Bold/Cathedral Bold.ttf"

Cathedral Italic.ttf"

GardenDisplayCaps.ttf"

Gunther Calligraphic Regular/gunthrcl.ttf"

GuntherNarrow/GuntherNarrow.ttf"

IgnaciousCondensed_Regular.ttf"

Metalcut/Metalcut.ttf"

Metalcut Bold/Metalcut_Bold.ttf"

Metalcut BoldOblique/Metalcut_BoldOblique.ttf"

Metalcut Oblique/Metalcut_Oblique.ttf"

OldCountry/OldCountry.ttf"

Walters/Walters.ttf"

Walters Bold/waltersbold.ttf"

Walters BoldItalic/Walters BoldItalic.ttf"

Walters Italic/waltersitalic.ttf"

Woodtype Ornaments 2/WoodtypeOrnaments-Two.otf" (Substituted an OTF version)

Many of these I know were old fonts I had from way back in the Appleworks days.

This isn't about invalidated fonts. This is fonts - many are supplied with Catalina - that DO. NOT. SHOW. UP. in Apple apps (Mail, Numbers, etc). I've been working with Apple support for 3 weeks now to no avail. This is an issue that manifested with Catalina and I'm experiencing consistently on two different machines. I have cleared font caches, removed duplicates, tried safe mode, and turned of Extensis suitcase. While some of the affected fonts ARE in my Extensis suitcase vault - when Suitcase is completely disabled I still see the same effect with Apple System fonts, such as the Avenir family, Helvetica light and light oblique, and others. Having Suitcase activated only increases the number of fonts that don't work.

This is not a normal 'glitch' that routine maintenance will fix.

Hello nivlekgn,

Thank you for posting in the Apple Support Communities. I understand that some fonts are missing after upgrading to macOS Catalina, and you’re unable to redownload them. I’m here for you. 

It sounds like the font isn’t being validated on your Mac. After it’s validated, the font should be installed in the Font Book app. Check to see that the font is in a supported file, then try downloading it again from the original source. I believe the support articles below can offer some additional insight: 

How to install and remove fonts on your Mac

Restore fonts that came with your Mac using Font Book

I hope this information is useful. Kind regards.

I don't have a full solution for you but I suspect it has something to do with an ability to render TTF fonts. One font I used a lot I fixed by downloading the OTF version of it.

Things I have tried:

1. Moving the font to the user font folder instead of my Font Manager folder.
2. Deleting my font caches and restarting.
3. Starting the Mac in safe mode which does a repair check on the drive

Since none of these things worked I am having to go through my font library and delete or substitute the missing fonts. Not happy. Many of the fonts I have do not have OTF versions. There is an online converter to OTF fonts but I don't trust it. Font corruption can really cause headaches.

Except that this is occurring with apple supplied fonts - the ones you cannot change/move/delete - and only in Apple apps. So while that may be the reason for 'some issues' it's not the root of the core issue.

My fonts aren't missing. The files are there. It's just that they aren't being recognized. The fonts that aren't being recognized are .ttf files. The were being recognized prior to upgrade.

It's funny. In reading another thread about this problem, the suggestion was to manually move the fonts into the user folder and the reboot.

Really? Just take us back to Windows 3.1, ffs.

Weird thing. In the keynote I worked on before Catalina I see empty text fields. And when I select a different font from the same family the whole text of that field comes back. I have to change all text fields on every page by hand. Thanks Apple. 😕

This is a huge problem for me. I work with fonts most hours of the day. One of my keynote's doesn't show any of the texts any more. Apple please fix this a.s.a.p.

Yep... that's the issue I'm seeing.

Ditto - just lost a ton of presentations that were working perfectly a week ago on Mohave