Ever since I upgraded from Mavericks to Yosemite most of the dialog boxes on my Mac will look like this:
This one for example asks me to enter my admin password - however many dialogs are completely unusable when you can't read what they ask you.
Anyone has this problem? Is there a solution for this?
MacBook Air, OS X Yosemite (10.10.1)
Kurt Lang got it totally right. Highly recommend what he suggested, above.
> ...
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 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 the current logged in user account. After running the command, close Terminal and immediately restart your Mac.
Following his instructions immediately and totally solved my identical problems with various applications and the System replacing text with "letters in squares" (in my case, question marks in a square). Clearing all of the font cache files is the fix.
I might add that a "temporary, quick-and-dirty" fix that solved the problem, temporarily, in several applications was to log out of my Account and then relog in.
Go to Font Book and verify and repair fonts.
That effect is usually caused by having a third-party font manager installed.
I did this and all my fonts seem to be okay. No error messages or warnings. 😕
I do not have a font manager installed.
Hmmm. Well something is messed up with the font that the system is using for the dialogs. I don't know off-hand what dialog that is, but there are clearly corrupt font issues.
An OS re-install might fix the issue, but I'm not certain of that and it seems a bit heavy-handed.
Font Book is a font manager, but third party managers are not, and never are directly the cause. What you're seeing is the font LastResort. The OS uses this when either a font it needs to use for the text is badly damaged, or much more frequently, the font cache data is trashed. The simplest approach to try first is to clear the font cache files.
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 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 the current logged in user account. After running the command, close Terminal and immediately restart your Mac.
Haha - indeed that's what came to my mind but I want to avoid a re-install of course.
I just removed all user-installed fonts and tadaaa: the dialog boxes look as if there had never been any problem. Now going to re-install one font after another to find out which one was the problem...
You responded while I was typing, or I would have typed this instead. 🙂
That being the case, you probably installed a third party font (or a few) which conflict with the system fonts. Most likely some sort of Helvetica font.
Cheers for the first hint anyway - I guess I will reset the cache just for good measure. 🙂
After just re-installing all my user fonts the problem still seems to be gone. I'm confused...
Problem solved. Thank you all for your tips and support!
Solution was to remove all user installed fonts (after backing them up to a folder on the desktop), then installing them from scratch.
So the most likely issue was trashed font cache files. Manually removing active fonts forced the OS to rebuild the cache files. Putting the third party fonts back just caused it to update the cache files again, which had already been rebuilt.
I had this problem this morning. Old computer (including having red wine spilt in it over a year ago) so I thought it was just in its death throes but this worked a treat. Fortunately, the names of files/programs was still visible so I could find terminal without too much fuss.
Thanks very much.
Yosemite dialog boxes use broken font?
