Arial Disappeared

[lunamedia]

Hi, Mountain Lion 10.8.2, MBP mid-2012. Arial has mysteriously disappeared in the last hour, making browsing very odd. For example, previously read messages in Google Apps mail are bolded - well, everything is bolded, because Regular is missing.

There is no Arial Regular in Macintosh HD/Library/Fonts (the other variants are all present). Weirdly, I don't even see it in this location in my backups on my external drive.

Sent a copy of Arial.ttf over from an Air in the house - see attached screenshot. Looks ok in Finder, appears entirely not right at all when I go to install via Font Book. If I do install, anything in Arial regular just goes nuts (long strings of capital A characters in a box, which I presume means font missing).

Stumped and a little concerned.

I have installed a couple of games today into user/Applications (from Humble Indie Bundle), and not long before the issue occurred, installed Boomerang Gmail extension for Safari (since removed, although the issue occurs across all browsers of course, and there's no Arial available in Photoshop).

Have read of apps installing duplicate fonts - in particular Office, which I don't have. Have validated all fonts in Font Book, and removed some duplicates (nothing related to Arial).

Totally stuck now, any ideas? Thanks

 

[benwiggy]

Do you not have a backup?

The problems with an imported copy of Arial.ttf may just relate to the font cache. Use a utility like Onyx to clear the Font Cache, or google for the Terminal command to do this.

 

[lunamedia]

My Time Machine backups to my external drive all miss the font too, as mentioned. Weird.

I used the instructions at:

http://www.typophile.com/node/95283

to flush font cache for both User and sudo but still have same non-English issue as in my screenshot, after a couple of restarts also.

EDIT: reinstall of Arial.ttf (even though showing as non-English in the Font Book window) has fixed, after the font cache flush. Thanks benwiggy