Dictionary has trouble with one of its fonts... How to solve?

Question

Dictionary has trouble with one of its fonts... How to solve?

Hi everyone,

My problem is the following: the OS X Dictionary app has severe trouble displaying one of the fonts it uses, I assume it should be Baskerville Italic (Bold Italic gets displayed correctly). See the following screenshot:

I have pretty much tried everything: resetting system fonts via Font Book, manually de- and reactivating the fonts Dictionary uses (Baskerville, Helvetica Neue, and Hiragino Mincho Pro W3; they're all active now) and checking whether I have other fonts that OS X could possibly confuse with one of the system fonts (I have a large font library with many duplicates from art school). Nothing helped.

Anybody had a similar problem and found a solution for this?

On a related, but less important note: when I reset all system fonts with Font Book (which should throw all fonts that are not included in OSX in a separate folder and deactivate them, as far as I understood it), nothing happened, except that he told me all my system fonts are fine. Could it be that installing new versions of OSX over older ones confuses the system about which are system fonts and which aren't?

And: I cannot find Baskerville in the system font folder at /System/Library/Fonts. Isn't it supposed to be there if Dictionary uses it?

Thanks for any help!

Dictionary, Fontbook-OTHER, Mac OS X (10.7.2)

Posted on Nov 8, 2011 12:49 PM

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Answer 1

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

122,282 points

Nov 8, 2011 1:22 PM in response to mentalmenthol

It looks like you have a junk font installed that maps cyrillic or other characters to normal latin codepoints. You need to find and remove it. If you don't know what font it might be, you could go through your fonts in Fontbook, Preview = Sample, and see which one shows that stuff instead of the correct abcdefg...

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Answer 2

Nov 8, 2011 2:49 PM in response to Tom Gewecke

Thanks, Tom, I managed to resolve the issue thanks to your input!

Turns out it wasn't actually a junk font, but just the Greek/Cyrillic character subsets of Baskerville that I needed to deactivate. Weird though that Dictionary would confuse them when language settings are on english and german...

Cheers,

Tobi

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Answer 3

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

122,282 points

Nov 8, 2011 4:14 PM in response to mentalmenthol

mentalmenthol wrote:

just the Greek/Cyrillic character subsets of Baskerville that I needed to deactivate.

How did you do that?

Those characters are new in Lion. I don't see how they could wind up replacing the Latin that is supposed to be there -- very strange bug.

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Answer 4

Nov 8, 2011 5:01 PM in response to Tom Gewecke

From looking at the font information it looks like I have versions of Baskerville from different sources installed. The version that I assume to be the standard Apple installation coming with Lion includes Greek and Cyrillic in one font file (totalling at 1'109 characters per weight). In addition to those I had separate font files called e.g. "Cyrillic A Upright", "Greek Inclined" etc. that would apparently only include the respective character sets (counting around 200-250 characters each). These are the ones I deactivated entirely, so NOT some characters from the same font file. Might have expressed myself a bit unclearly before...

That however still doesn't explain how Dictionary ended up deviating away from the Apple standard font... But well, as long as the problem's solved.🙂

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Answer 5

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

122,282 points

Nov 8, 2011 5:20 PM in response to mentalmenthol

mentalmenthol wrote:

In addition to those I had separate font files called e.g. "Cyrillic A Upright", "Greek Inclined" etc. that would apparently only include the respective character sets (counting around 200-250 characters each). These are the ones I deactivated entirely

Thanks for the explanation! Those separate font files are what I meant by "junk", but that is not really a good term in this case, they are just using a non-standard encoding which is potentially incompatible with the Unicode standard used by OS X. Lion's expanded Baskerville is the Unicode replacement for them.

It is quite common for OS X to get confused by fonts like that which map symbols to Latin instead of their correct Unicode assignments. Helvetica Fractions and Times Phonetic have caused similar problems for many users in the past.

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