Jumbled Fonts in Mail and Browser

Hi, first open Font Book in Applications, choose All Fonts on the left, then highlight any font on the right, then Select All, then in Fonbook's menu>File>Validate Fonts, remove any red x ones.

If that doesn't work, in Mail Preferences>Fonts & Colors, what fonts do you have set to use there for all types?

gazo --

1. Did you restart the Mac after your cleared the font cache?
2. Did this just start?
3. What was changed right before this started? Added new fonts or apps?
4. Open up Font Book and visually check all the fonts. Do you see one that looks like the bad font?

It does kind of look like Cyrillic -- or Phonetic or something else . . .but not exactly.
It would do well to look for odd versions like these.
What font do you have set for your Mail and Safari in the preferences for those apps?

'Fonts' is the only topic more confusing to me than 'printing'; and I've studied typography and splines for decades.

The internet, or at least the e-mail community is encouraging the use of the Unicode 'UTF-8' as a character encoding, which I use for all web browsers and e-mail applications.

Let me refer you to an earlier thread for a taste of the bizarre. Try the suggestions there:

Topic : Gray screen w/ pic of hard drive upon bootup & gobbledy-gook when typing
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2628518&tstart=0

Oh, your example is a forwarded message. Here is a postscript.

This won't help you, but perfectionists don't know why correct quotes and other marks are beyond modern computers. The only correct quotes are in a Microsoft character encoding (which I choose to not use on moral grounds). A friend uses the Windows 1252 encoding.

I can't remember the details, but my forwarding her letters produced the 'unprintable character' mark in place of quotes. We experimented with different character encodings, but the forwarding of letters by Apple Mail were, at the end, completely inexplicable.

OK, I have something for you. I actually read RFC 3629 on UTF-8 and found a relevant paragraph:

http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3629.txt

+Implementations of the decoding algorithm above MUST protect against+
+decoding invalid sequences. For instance, a naive implementation may+
+decode the overlong UTF-8 sequence C0 80 into the character U 0000,
+or the surrogate pair ED A1 8C ED BE B4 into U+233B4. Decoding+
+invalid sequences may have security consequences or cause other+
+problems. See Security Considerations (Section 10) below.+

This means (to me) that MacOSX should never produce Cyrillic from a properly working Roman keyboard; it should stop with an error condition. (Check the Console.)

Does the iMac print UTF-8 text files correctly? TextEdit will now allow files to be saved in HTML. In 'System Preferences', 'Open and Save', 'Encoding', select UTF-8. Now write something in English. Does it look jumbled? Save it in HTML and view it. Does it look jumbled?

If so, try a new keyboard (perhaps a USB). If it's still jumbled, the paragraph above guarantees the algorithm in MacOSX is damaged, for it should have crashed TextEdit with an error condition. I should think an OS re-install would be appropriate.

If it prints fine English, I haven't a clue as to the problem--sorry.

Sorry, I shouldn't be 'contributing' for a while. My logic is ludicrous, as you've noticed. The RFC warns that ill-formed UTF-8 must not be converted to PostScript or PDF, but produce an error message. I was claiming that well-formed UTF-8 should not produce the wrong characters as PDF, but an error message.

The latter is not such a threat to security as the first, which can slip malicious scripts into computers past intrusion detection systems.

It's likely the TO: and other ASCII in a letter are not encoded in UTF-8, so your problem is at least narrowed, probably, to the failure of MacOSX to translate UTF-8 to PDF correctly. The conclusion seems the same as before.

I'd check the hard drive as a possible cause for corruption. Sorry for the sloppy reasoning, and good luck.

Here is what it looks like

http://img146.imageshack.us/img146/7132/jumbledfont.jpg

I think most likely you have a junk cyrillic font installed which you need to trash. It might have CYR or SLA at the end of the name and be in Home/Library/Fonts.

All your posts in this thread are total nonsense, best stay away from such topics.

Thanks, Tom.
I was pretty sure it was a font conflict,
but couldn't quite match any of the samples i found with it.

We can always count on you for the correct answer/solution.
🙂

Tom,

My posts were very badly written because of fever, sorry. However, I can't agree with your simple evaluation of my competence to offer an alternative test and fix, or competence in general. Here's a summary of my posts.

1. The internet community recommends UTF-8 for browsers, e-mail, and it's being recommended by many for files. Because of the large number of processes a letter passes through on route to the printer, the problem can be a strange error, as the thread referred to showed.

2. Apple Mail can display strange errors when forwarding mail. Mail is still primitive: left & right double quotes are represented by a single mark, single quotes are as well; and Italic is replaced by slanted Roman (begun by Adrian Frutiger). Mail will improve.

3. In case UTF-8 was being used, and it's second plane, Cyrillic, was printed instead of the first plane of ASCII Roman because of damage to the module that converts it, I offered a test for this. I see no problem with the test. The keyboard was in apropos, and the RFC was misinterpreted. Neither error did much harm, and I correct suggesting a new keyboard here.

4. I corrected misinterpreting the RFC.

My approach to reading such posts would be to clarify the confusion, as above, and to note that trying a new keyboard had no purpose.

Your post repeated BDAqua's appropriate, initial step, without details. This is a good maintenance activity, which should be done after installing a new font. However, if two fonts have the same internal name (a font conflict), isn't an error message displayed? This is why I offered an alternative possibility.

I doubt the OP knows what a 'junk font' is (I've never encountered one in forty years of collecting free fonts similar to the classics). I have hundred of free text fonts, and all were verified. BDAqua's post would have found your declared error.

I cannot contribute for at least two weeks, possibly longer. However, I suggest your posts be kinder and more explanatory in the future. Bye.


Bruce Bathurst
Retired Computer Consultant

if two fonts have the same internal name (a font conflict), isn't an error message displayed?

No. Nor will font validation normally detect anything. There have been various examples of this kind of problem in the forums. Here is one where the culprit was Baskerville CYR

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5892160&#5892160

(Still here.) Thanks: that reads like malware! (I keep my active free fonts in /Library/Fonts, so all can use them.)

Free Alternative

I've never encountered one, but now I'm aware of their being common. Thanks. Fortunately, I've always used the free 'Linotype Fontexplorer X', which shows conflicting fonts, lets you examine each, choose which to move to the Trash Basket, and cleans application and system font caches.

Garbled Fonts

Font Geeks' Suggestions
http://homepage.mac.com/macdrben/blogwavestudio/LH20041002162423/index.html

Growl notifications

The free 'Linotype Fontexplorer X' reports problems when importing to 'Growl'. (A Tiger version of 'Growl' is still available from the developer's website.) I rarely use 'UnicodeChecker', which has only one Growl notification, only because I write in XeTex using TexShop.

Font Book and Garbled Fonts

It appears that font conflicts only in 10.5's Font Book gives a proper error. However, in 10.3 it caused 'Font Book' to crash so badly, the Mac had to be restarted. (See the black screen.)

Review of 10.3's 'Font Book'
http://homepage.mac.com/macdrben/blogwavestudio/LH20041002162415/LHA200410241805 49/index.html

I'll finish with an example of what strange causes a garbled font can also have.
I trust the OP has fixed his font problem. If not, I suggest switching to UTF-8.

Font Conflicts With Tiger And Extensis Suitcase
http://macosx.com/tech-support/mac/font-conflicts-with-tigerextensis-suitcase/46 13.html

I suggest switching to UTF-8.

UTF-8 has nothing to do with this problem. If you will look carefully at the sample given by the OP, you should be able see that it is a simple substitution of the correct English letters by some font which has mapped Cyrillic to Latin (which no recognized encoding does). The headings from top to bottom are From:, Date:, To:, and Subject: From these you can decode the subject of the message as "SS D?cor Tips and Catalogue Letter".

Bruce --
I'm sure we all appreciate your wanting to help posters here.
I should note that Tom G. is one of two experts here, who know all about fonts.
The other being Kurt Lang.

You do not need to post (especially if you're not feeling well) in topics where
your expertise is stretched, and the subject is being actively addressed.
It only confuses our Original Poster.

All the best, and hope you're feeling better.

Hey ~Bee, I just came back to post the exact same thing! 🙂

BB always tries to be helpful, but as you say, Kurt & Tom are unsurpassed in understanding these particular issues! 🙂