Safari fonts messed up

Success!

You were definitely on the right track with fonts, but the fonts affected were affected only in Safari and nowhere else. That's why I went and deleted some Safari .plist files but I didn't get them all:

• Indiscriminately trashed all sorts of Safari .plist files but I'm not sure I got them all. Probably didn't.

No, I didn't. Or perhaps I did but didn't quit Safari or log out so it might have kept re-reading a Safari cache file, but anyway the guilty party was none other than ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Safari.plist.

Trashing that file fixed the problem but of course everything else was reset to defaults including history, bookmarks, basically everything.

But wait! It gets better!

Because I did not want to forego all my many Safari settings I poked about in com.apple.Safari.plist and looked for anything and everything font-related. At first I got discouraged because my plist file had grown so large, over 400k in size whereas a default empty .plist is only about 3k. Remember this Mac began life with Snow Leopard or maybe even Leopard. There were hundreds of lines to investigate and lots of trial and error but in the end I identified these two specific keys:

	<key>com.apple.Safari.ContentPageGroupIdentifier.WebKit2DefaultFixedFontSize</key>
	<integer>18</integer>
	<key>com.apple.Safari.ContentPageGroupIdentifier.WebKit2DefaultFontSize</key>
	<integer>24</integer>

Those keys do not exist in a default .plist, and there was nothing I could do with Safari's Preferences that would affect them. Contrast that with the fact I could arbitrarily delete some other keys and launching Safari again would re-build them. Yet there was a lot of stuff in there including Extensions of all things that have been long dead, and apparently if Safari doesn't know what to do with them it leaves them alone.

So: taking out those two lines AND ONLY those two was enough to fix the funky fonts!

Much appreciated Kurt! Now please reply so I can mark it solved?

Thank you Kurt, I really appreciate your reply and I apologize for not responding earlier.

I had tried all those things already and you are correct about Command + / - as well as using page zoom. None of it makes any meaningful difference though. If Page Zoom in "settings for this website" is set to 100% I get the messed up eBay screenshot I posted earlier.

Noteworthy is the fact that if I get the fonts to render reasonably correct (smaller), then the frames enclosing them become not correct. They also become too small, so while the text is smaller the frames scrunch the smaller text and I just get a smaller version of the screenshot I posted earlier.

I'm at a loss 😟

I suppose I could nuke this entire User Library. Maybe I'll do that. Much appreciate your help.

Edit: Quit Safari and dragged the entire ~/Library/Safari folder to the Trash. Didn't fix it 😟 Gotta be something else in ~/Library/ causing the messed- uppedness.

That's OK, I knew what you meant regarding screen zoom. I believe I exhausted all those possibilities.

The problem does not manifest in a different user account, so you are absolutely correct. It's just this one account that is the problem, which is good as far as I am concerned because I know I can fix it. It only affects Safari too, so it should be even easier to fix. Only Safari and only one account, but most web pages, so not just eBay and Apple. Most websites are affected but some are more obvious than others.

Thanks for the suggestions regarding font data. One of the things I not mention was Safe Mode in addition to restoring standard fonts in Font Book but they did not change anything. Safe Mode was supposed to clear out some system font caches (?) but I tried your suggestion too:

Removing: /private/var/folders/zz/zyxvpxvq6csfxvn_n00000c4000031/C/System
Removing: /private/var/folders/f4/drzhn4x5483bhsrzhw2vpyy00000gn/C/com.apple.FontRegistry

No changes 😟

Still I think you're on to something though. The clue is definitely font-related but it's definitely confined to Safari. Firefox displays those pages OK. I'm going to try focusing on Safari settings in particular. It's stuck on something. But what?

It's not so important that I could not simply nuke the entire User Library but I would like to learn exactly what has been causing the problem all these years.

I really appreciate your interest and thanks for your help!