Safari with question marks instead of text

Discovered what the issue is.

I have been having this problem ever since upgrading to Sierra and Suitcase Fusion 7. I've tried all the solutions I've seen on the web from the many people that seem to be experiencing the same. None worked. Some improved things for a day or two. The problem persists.

I'm guessing that most people are in this boat... you use Suitcase Fusion or some other font manager, you have fonts you've found and installed over the years and the question marks instead of proper characters only show up in Apple products, Numbers, Pages, Mail, Safari. No such issue in Word, Exel, Firefox.

But here's what I found out on the phone with Extensis today. Check the fonts that are garbled. You'll probably find that 100% of them are Postscript fonts. And amazingly, Apple, Google and few others have decided to move away from Postscript, granted it is old technology. However, my problem is, nowhere on the Apple or Extensis product info does it tell you that your postscript fonts will be rendered useless upon upgrade. Shame on both companies. Extensis customers have to be, like me, designers, or at least people with many many fonts. Otherwise why would you need a font manager?

I'm now stuck with a) not ever using my postscript fonts again b) trying to source and buy (at a great cost) all my fonts as truetype or other c) try to use an font conversion program (which will take days and may not work correctly).

Wow... I'm in shock.

At home, I use Suitcase Fusion, but at work, we use the big brother of Suitcase Fusion — Universal Type Server, on macOS Sierra 10.12.6, Safari 11.0.

This week, I started having trouble with the exact same thing you are descibing here: fonts showing as question marks in Safari, and in Mac Mail.

I tried all of the solutions mention in this thread, but none of them worked. The only thing I found that works is opening Universal Type Client, and doing a search for all Apple fonts (search word: Apple), selecting them and setting their activation to Permanent.

With over 7,000 fonts in use (we are printing company), there is no way that I am going to be converting all of these to OTF.

Sorry I should have been more clear. There are 2 issues at play. The one affecting web browsers is a conflict between the system version and the one you may have stored separately in your font manager. This was never a problem in previous version of MacOS and SF, but now, I have to deactivate my version of fonts like Arial, Trebuchet, Verdana etc, or the browser shows question marks. If this was the only issue it wouldn't be a huge deal... deactivate 10 or 15 fonts and you're okay. But the postscript issue is significant because many many other fonts, that don't conflict with system fonts, show up as question marks simply because they are PS fonts. No issue with truetype, Adobe type kit, Google fonts etc. Sorry for not clarifying this first time round.

FinFan62 wrote:

The one affecting web browsers is a conflict between the system version and the one you may have stored separately in your font manager. This was never a problem in previous version of MacOS and SF, but now, I have to deactivate my version of fonts like Arial, Trebuchet, Verdana etc, or the browser shows question marks.

Thanks for the clarification, that is really pretty terrible behavior in a browser.

Absolutely correct. My workflow on this is to:

1. Open Font Book

2. Select all fonts

3. Right click on the fonts and click "validate Fonts"

4. Any fonts that have the yellow warning symbol beside them, I deactivate in my 3rd party font manager (like Suitcase Fusion)

5. Restart the browser (or sometimes just reload the page)

This clears up the question mark errors for me. Just clicking on "Remove Duplicates" in Font Book will not work.

I agree. I didn't have problems until I upgraded to Sierra. I've been having major issues with Suitcase. Fonts won't load, it crashed a few times and I got the file vault error message. I had to reinstall it and now I only have 3 fonts in there and they still won't load. I ran Font Doctor last night and quarantined all the bad fonts. Today all my menus and folders have question marks instead of the fonts! Maybe font doctor screwed up the fonts? So frustrating.

I have Suitcase Fusion 6 and sierra on my iMac at work but I'm not having any issues - yet. Maybe because it's a new computer?? My iMac at home is 8 years old.

I converted all my old PostScript fonts to Postscript flavoured OpenType (OTF) fonts for a different reason, discussed on this support page for FontExplorer X Pro (the font manager I use). That page states, 'Due to security measures in OS X 10.11 (El Capitan), PostScript Fonts need to be located somewhere in your Users directory, such as /Users/[username]/Font Folder in order for them to work properly in some graphic applications.'

I didn't want to install these fonts in my Users directory, so I used a conversion utility (can't remember which one sorry) to convert them all to OTF. I've been using them for over a year now, with no problems that I'm aware of.

(I am just recently, however, having a problem with Helvetica not working properly in a number of applications, and sometimes getting replaced with exclamation marks. I'm still looking into that one.)

Question marks instead of text is an indication of a problem with fonts.

Open the Font Book located in your Applications folder.

From the Font Boot menu bar click Font Book > Preferences then click: Resolve duplicates by moving files to the Trash

Quit then relaunch Safari to test.

If that doesn't help, back to the Font Book menu bar click File > Restore Standard Fonts

Quit then relaunch Safari to test.

Ok..

Please post a link to one of those websites in your reply.

Ok.. no question marks on that website but my Mac's software is up to date.

I noticed your profile indicates your Mac is running v10.11.4 and Safari 9.1.

If you haven't done as yet, there are updates available that may help the question mark issue.

Open the App Store then select Updates from the menu top of the App Store window.

Your Mac may restart several times during the update process. That's ok.

When it's finished, that will have updated Safari to 9.1.11 and El Capitan to v10.11.5.

Then try those sites on Safari.

Please back up all data before proceeding.

Launch the Font Book application and validate all fonts. You must select the fonts in order to validate them. See the built-in help and this support article for instructions. If Font Book finds any issues, resolve them.

Start up in safe mode to rebuild the font caches. Restart as usual and test.

Note: If FileVault is enabled in OS X 10.9 or earlier, or if a firmware password is set, or if the startup volume is a software RAID, you can’t start in safe mode. In that case, ask for instructions.

If you still have problems, then from the Font Book menu bar, select

File ▹ Restore Standard Fonts...

You'll be prompted to confirm, and then to enter your administrator login password.

Also note that if you deactivate or remove any built-in fonts, for instance by using a third-party font manager, the system may become unstable.

Worked for me in Sierra. Tried all the other methods but ultimately I did a File ▹ Restore Standard Fonts before then Start up in safe mode to rebuild the font caches. Fixed.

Awesome, Apple Care couldn't help and gave up

Many thanks!