Mysterious authentication dialogue font error.

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Mysterious authentication dialogue font error.

This problem has persisted through several upgrades on OSX, from Tiger, Through Snow Leopard and now into Lion. There appears to be some kind of corruption with one of the system fonts which only shows up in password authentication digogue boxes. See below:

All the type characters become these odd little squares. Makes it very hard to know what the buttons are saying.

Even stranger - It doesn't show up in any other system dialogue boxes. The fact that it has persisted leads me to believe that one of the fonts in my user folder is conflicting with one of the system fonts and it moves with my user profile from one OSX install to the next, so I'm not sure that a format and reinstall would even help. If I knew which one it was I could remove it, but I have no idea which one it could be. Any idea which font is being used here?

MacBook Pro (17-inch Early 2011), iOS 5.0.1

Posted on Feb 16, 2012 1:28 PM

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Answer 1

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baltwo

Level 9

62,374 points

Feb 16, 2012 3:58 PM in response to nskresle

A’s with boxes around them is always a sign of trouble with the main system font, Lucida Grande.*

Close all running applications. From an administrator account, open the Terminal app and enter the following command. You can also copy/paste it from here into the Terminal window:

sudo atsutil databases -remove

Terminal will then ask for you to enter your admin password. As you type, it will not show anything, so be sure to enter it correctly.

This removes all font cache files. Both for the system and all user font cache files. After running the command, close Terminal and immediately restart your Mac.

If after that the problem returns, then Lucida Grande itself is damaged and needs to be replaced.

* Font Management in OS X

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