Safari 5.1 font rendering problem

[psychomachine]

Hi,

Safari 5.1 on Lion GM is rendering some pages illegible, like in the attached image. Looking at the source displays the proper text. Even copying it and pasting it into a text file displays the correct text. But in Safari, it is illegible.

I have tried clearing the font caches, restarting, but to no avail. My default font encoding in Safari is UTF-8. The page from the attached image is also utf8.

This happens on some pages -- every day I encounter two or three such pages.

Anybody noticed anything similar? Any idea what else I could do to fix this.

All best
Psych

 

[CyBeRino]

I've had that exactly once and restarting (maybe even rebooting, i don't remember) helped.

Have you tried in a new user account?

 

[psychomachine]

rebooting doesn't change it for me -- but your hint about trying under a different user name was brilliant!!! i just checked and safari seems to be fine there.

i tried deleting the safari user preferences in my regular account in the hope that will help, but it didn't

so my question is now: is there anything else i can do in my regular account to try to fix this. it sounds like a major pain creating a new user account, moving everything there, getting everything set up again... (iTunes, networking, all the files etc...) or am I making it sound worse than it is?

 

[CyBeRino]

rebooting doesn't change it for me -- but your hint about trying under a different user name was brilliant!!! i just checked and safari seems to be fine there.

i tried deleting the safari user preferences in my regular account in the hope that will help, but it didn't

so my question is now: is there anything else i can do in my regular account to try to fix this. it sounds like a major pain creating a new user account, moving everything there, getting everything set up again... (iTunes, networking, all the files etc...) or am I making it sound worse than it is?

Likely you can get away with deleting your entire ~/Library/Caches folder. I don't think this is a preference problem.

 

[etabisco]

Font issue

I had the same problem. I did some detective work and the following is what I found (though I admit that what I think I find, I may not be explaining correctly).

After turning on the developer web inspector on the page where it occurred, it seemed that my system was suddenly lacking a Sans Serif font to default to. In it's absence Safari was defaulting to Last Resort font — which is the boxed A's that you are seeing.

I activated sets of Helvetica that seemed to be deactivated and the problem went away.

 

[psychomachine]

dear etabisco,

thanks for posting your solution. actually, yesterday i bit the bullet and created a new user account for myself (after emptying the caches didn't fix the problem for me).

but your fix may help others if they run into this problem.

all best,
psych

 

[capsule9]

I turned off all non system helvetica fonts, cleared cache, restarted safari and that worked

 

[Jeffrey26]

I had "FontAgent" working. After deselecting this program it worked fine for me.

 

[atari1356]

Digging up a slightly old thread... but I was having the same issue and was able to fix it by editing a certain webkit framework file. Basically, if you're using something like FontExplorer X or FontAgent Pro, you have to edit a file used by webkit, to let it know where some fonts are stored.

There's information about this fix in this Apple support forum thread:
https://discussions.apple.com/message/15823996#15823996

And this video will help guide you through editing the file:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dW9aHlOIJUg