Font problems in Safari 5.1 (Lion)

How do I revert to an older version of Safari? When I try to remove v5.1 or drop v5.0.6 on top of it in Applications I get a message saying “Safari.app” can’t be modified or deleted because it’s required by Mac OS X.“

Thanks for this solution. It did seem to work, except now I'm having another problem. Every time I restart, all fonts in Safari appear in italics. The same is true in some other Webkit applications. If I use Font Explorer Pro to clear the system font cache and restart, the problem is solved. But the next time I restart again, it comes back.

Any ideas?

It's more tha Arial - and messing with Arial impacts left column of iCal in Day View. You can check how Safari is reading fonts here: http://www.fonttester.com/font_test.html

PS Seems the whole issue is cuased by Safari's new Sandbox not letting third party font managaers into the Sandbox. And / or if Mac Font Book has duplicates you will have the same problem. Use font Book to validate fonts / remove duplicates. Solves the problem for many of those not using third party font mgt.

I have Suitcase Fusion 3. For me it's the Arial MT opentype family. I turn any font in that family on and Safari goes Block-A. I can turn on my Type 1 or old TTF versions and it's fine. It happens instantly without refreshing the web page. What an absurd problem for Safari. It seems like it should be fairly easy to fix and the fact that Apple support is claiming ignorance seems bizarre at best considering how widespread this has been discussed.

I am an IT Manager that had the same problem... I have 10 Macs in our Art department with the same

problem.. We use Font Book and Font Agent Pro also. To fix the problem I ran the verification tool in each one of these font managers. You must fix any errors that appear. There were 2 culprits... A duplicate font and a bad font.

I deleted both of these fonts and now everything works just fine.

I hope this helps.

Thanks Kurt,

Your solution to clear the font caches using Terminal worked fine for me!

The sites that had the problem (not all sites BTW, not Apples site for instance...😕) now display as they should.

Hello everybody, I am not a computer nerd.. most of the things you are saying is like chinese to me.

I have the same problem, but not only for Safari, my Skype, and at the Dashboard my calculator + converter's numbers are all like "A" in boxes.

I have tried to apply this:

http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-20087102-263/webkit-sandboxing-conflict-cau ses-safari-block-a-font-problem/?tag=mncol;title

didn't work.

This is an issue caused by Apple's latest Lion, after I upgraded to it, all these are happening... I need real help, APPLE should send us an update to fix it.

please email me if you can help,
acabaoglu@yahoo.com

thanks,

Arda

HI Arda,

Apple squished this bug a while ago. Make sure you have upgraded to the latest version of the system software (OS X version 10.7.3) through Software Update (available through the Apple menu). This will also upgrade Safari to version 5.1.5. You should be good to go after that. Let us know if this doesn't work for you.

Hi Andrew,

Thank you so much for very quick help, I have updated as you have said, no I am using the latest softwares, but unfortunately it still doesn't still work.

😟

Hope you can suggest sth to me, thanks a lot

Here is what I found that works!

There are several Font Folders: 1 in the system/library, and another in the main library. The system/lib fonts get updated with softare update, thre Library Fonts don't--I had some from the 1990s remember them?

The older fonts were broken into individual fonts types by family (ie helvetica, helvetica black, etc.) while for the new ones are there is just a single package that contains these variations. Using the app FontBook, I could remove duplicates with the exact names, Heveltica and Helvatica, but since one contained HelBlack and the other didn't, Hel Black remained in my Lib folder (This was one of the offending fonts, dating from 1997, so it had changed since then--just a bit).

Into the trash with HelBlack (and Condensed) and my issue went away instantly--no need to reboot or re open the apps (Mail and Safari).

To identify the offending font, copy a small portion of the bad text into a new mail message and use the show fonts command under Format to to determain the offender, then remove it from the Lib/Font (not the Sys/Lib/font) folder. (I had used TextEdit previously, but for some reason it uses the Sys Fonts, not the Lib fonts, so they diplayed correctly and didn't give the old names when I used the format window to determain the font.)

Worked instantly for me.