TextEdit docs opened in MacOS 12.6 Monterey are garbled

VikingOSX wrote:

Then, there is something about those documents, and not Bean or TextEdit. What is the actual file extension on that file?

I just used the current version of Bean on macOS Ventura 13.3.1 to open both .rtf and .rtfd from several years ago. Thus, the problem is not Bean or TextEdit, but corrupted documents, or documents that are some other format than what you think they are.

Place one of this documents on your Desktop, and then launch the Terminal application. Enter the following at the Terminal prompt, where filename is the actual name of the document on your Desktop:

cd ~/Desktop

file --mime-type filename

head -n1 <<<"$(< filename)"

# {\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\cocoartf1671\cocoasubrtf600

You should see something similar to the last commented output if it really is a .rtf file.

No cats were harmed in this example.

I am curious: is there any reason the last command above should be using the much shorter notation below?

head -1 filename

Before you mess with the containers, follow etresoft’s other advice: move the fonts that are inside your home Library aside.

1) Hold down Option key and choose Go->Library

2) Move the Fonts folder to your desktop.

3) Log out and log back in.

See? TextEdit now works with Helvetica.

jfgaylord wrote:

This is a font issue, however all of my past documents created on previous MacOS's were done with Helvetica, so I'll have to change the font in each document. I'll try that and report back.

Just delete your corrupt Helvetica font instead. That may fix all of the documents. I strongly suggest you verify that after deleting the corrupt font.

Note - this is a custom font that you have installed at some point. I'm not saying you should try to delete the system version of Helvetica. Don't try that, you can't do it. You need to find your custom version of Helvetica and delete that one. It's the one that isn't in a "/System/" folder.

jfgaylord wrote:

You didn't read carefully. Yes, I opened a new document. I typed < Command-B > then selected the text and used the (bold) command-B keystrokes. That produced the weird type. I later discovered it was the Helvetica font that got corrupted because Times works fine. I will try other fonts as well and I'll let you know if I encounter the same defect.

Thanks everyone for your help. Now you know there's a bug in Monterey TextEdit.

NO, you don't know that.

As etresoft and I both wrote, you have a version of Helvetica installed on your system, and that is corrupted.

Get rid of that, and just use the system provided version of Helvetica, and all will be well.

jfgaylord wrote:

Move it "aside" to where?

Somewhere that's not a "Fonts" folder.

If I move it to the Desktop it merely copies to there. Should I rename it temporarily?

Either option would work, as would just deleting the files, as long as you have backups. I just don't know all of the deep details of how the font management system works. After removing those fonts and restarting, you'll have to run Font Book to make sure that none of those fonts are still registered. Modern versions of macOS like to copy user files to system locations when they are installed in some database-driven system like the font cache. Merely deleting files from disk is never guaranteed to work and sometimes causes huge problems.

This is a particularly bad problem where fonts are concerned because deleting fonts from disk has historically been the preferred method of font management for lots of people. But Apple doesn't respect those traditional practices - not even a little bit. Font Book is how it's done. But Font Book can get confused, especially when people have lots of legacy fonts, and likely lots of legacy font management tools.

To be clear - I'm saying that any of this is happening in your case. I'm saying I don't know. And neither do you.

Considering the evidence you uncovered that Monterey has been accessing the fonts folder from my High Sierra on the other partition

No! I didn't say that. I said the opposite. Monterey was using the fonts in your home folder on Monterey. It isn't going to go across partitions unless you have configured your system or user accounts to span those partitions too. God help you if you've done that.

shouldn't I first delete the MacOS on that partition? Or is there an 'uninstall' procedure for that?

You are kind of at the cliff edge, staring over, right now. I'm telling you that you should just let well enough alone and walk back slowly.

The Fonts folder in your home directory is where the problem is right now. You need to clean that out. Then, after restarting, make sure that your font database, as viewed in Font Book, looks good with no incompatible fonts. Then check your documents. If they work properly, then that's probably all you need to do.

There is a chance that it won't work. Maybe you have 3 other font management tools installed. Maybe you do need to nuke and re-pave eventually. I'm just saying you should try the easy, less destructive method first. You are still talking about a newly installed version of Monterey. You seem to have some "Intel" SSD? That computer sounds pretty old. Maybe when you upgrade to an Apple Silicon machine you can take that opportunity for a cleaner break with the past.

I am glad that you have a workaround, but still the concern remains that such a common font as Helvetica would cause such unusual errors on your system.

Since Helvetica is distributed with macOS, in a read-only and sealed volume that cannot be modified by the user, it is unlikely that the font distributed with macOS is corrupted.

Is it possible that you have somewhere installed a copy of Helvetica that is corrupted?

If you search for Helvetica in Font Book, and then control-click and choose Reveal in Finder, where does it take you? It should be in /System/Library/Fonts

This is inside you user Library folder, i.e., in

/Users/admin/Library/Fonts

The system one is in a different place, namely

/System/Library/Fonts

You did not specifically install it, but you migrated this folder, containing a great many fonts, from your previous system.

You can try just moving this copy of Helvetica to your desktop, logging out and back in, and then see if the problem persists.

jfgaylord wrote:

Does Font Book know if a font is incompatible?

It should. It has a pretty standard "error check". By that I mean that if Font Book says a font is incompatible, then it is definitely incompatible. But just because Font Book doesn't show that message doesn't mean that any 3rd party font will work. Sometimes there are just wonky fonts.

I definitely will need to install some (I know, not Helvetica alternates !!!).

Check here for additional fonts that are available as document support fonts or downloadable fonts: Fonts included with macOS Monterey - Apple Support

Then, there is something about those documents, and not Bean or TextEdit. What is the actual file extension on that file?

I just used the current version of Bean on macOS Ventura 13.3.1 to open both .rtf and .rtfd from several years ago. Thus, the problem is not Bean or TextEdit, but corrupted documents, or documents that are some other format than what you think they are.

Place one of this documents on your Desktop, and then launch the Terminal application. Enter the following at the Terminal prompt, where filename is the actual name of the document on your Desktop:

cd ~/Desktop
file --mime-type filename
head -n1 <<<"$(< filename)"
#  {\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\cocoartf1671\cocoasubrtf600

You should see something similar to the last commented output if it really is a .rtf file.

No cats were harmed in this example.

jfgaylord wrote:

Terminal returned: {\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\cocoartf1561\cocoasubrtf610

I doubt the documents are corrupted since all of them appear normally when opened with TextEdit on my three older MacOS systems incl. High Sierra, El Capitan, and 10.6.8 – even after I have opened them on my Monterey system (without doing any editing).

The output from Terminal also suggests that the files are fine.

Did you try opening one of those files while booted in Safe Mode? Does it make any difference?

Luis Sequeira1 wrote:

I do not have a Monterey mac to test on. In my Ventura mac, Command-B works as expected.

Does pressing Command-B highligt the Format menu in your mac? Could it be that Command-B is assigned to something else?

Works fine on Monterey here. I even made an effort to create a RTFD document to test.

I'm skeptical of the OP's claim that the same documents work fine on older versions. The only way to be sure of that would be if those files were on an external drive being moved between different computers.

My guess is that they are simply corrupt. An RTFD document is a document container. It is a folder of other documents. Any kind of sync tool can easily corrupt them. Any network use will corrupt them. RTFD is not really a stable, supported format. If these files work on High Sierra and the OP has a High Sierra machine still running, they should be immediately converted into something more modern.

I will give you the benefit of the doubt that you have already checked that Monterey's TextEdit was not configured to open documents as text, instead of Rich Text Format (.rtf), or that those documents were not originally Teach/SimpleText dinosaurs from classic macOS.

I have High Sierra and El Capitan at home but am on the road and several hours away from further testing on this matter.

Can you open those .rtf/.rtfd documents with the Bean word processor?