Text bug in Mojave

[mithion]

Hey has anybody encountered problems in Mojave where text appears corrupted and is replaced with generic question mark blocks? We have a deployment of about 25 macs at our school and this bug has manifested itself in about a quarter of our machines. Sometimes it's the text inside apps like safari, but sometimes it's the macOS shell itself that is corrupted. If anybody has seen this and knows a fix, let me know as it is incredibly annoying to our users. Here's an example of the issue. Thanks!

 

[chrfr]

Hey has anybody encountered problems in Mojave where text appears corrupted and is replaced with generic question mark blocks? We have a deployment of about 25 macs at our school and this bug has manifested itself in about a quarter of our machines. Sometimes it's the text inside apps like safari, but sometimes it's the macOS shell itself that is corrupted. If anybody has seen this and knows a fix, let me know as it is incredibly annoying to our users. Here's an example of the issue. Thanks!

Most likely it's a matter of a corrupt font cache, or your deployment is missing essential fonts.
Try this command to reset the font cache:

sudo atsutil databases -remove

 

[mithion]

So I tried your command and that didn't seem to fix the issue. Also, we don't use any special deployment setup so it's pretty much plain macOS Mojave. I'm not quite sure how we'd missing basic system fonts in that case. Is there anything else I could should I just try a re-installation? I just find it weird it started showing up once people started moving to 10.14.2.

Here's an example from another user showing it doesn't just happen in Safari:

 

[whoisyourdaddy]

So I tried your command and that didn't seem to fix the issue. Also, we don't use any special deployment setup so it's pretty much plain macOS Mojave. I'm not quite sure how we'd missing basic system fonts in that case. Is there anything else I could should I just try a re-installation? I just find it weird it started showing up once people started moving to 10.14.2.

Here's an example from another user showing it doesn't just happen in Safari:

Perhaps there's a conflict or missing characters in fonts with displaying system fonts, custom fonts, or other app fonts. That user appears to be using Spanish which could be causing an issue with the app when retrieving it's fonts from another language database especially if they're using apps of differing languages within the same environment. Just a thought but could easily be another conflict. I would deduce what's the correlation between the reported issues. I'm doubting the entirety of everyone there is having the problem.

 

[mithion]

I think I might have figured it out and it of course my own fault. In my typical genius fashion, prior to the holidays, I had enacted a policy on our Jamf system that would run daily and perform maintenance tasks. I suspect one of those tasks was to clear the font cache. The policy was set to run once per day so as soon as users would reboot, the cache would be regenerated and things would work until the next day. I disabled the policy yesterday so I'm looking forward to seeing if the issue happens again but I'm betting it'll be back to normal. Thanks for all your help!

 

[whoisyourdaddy]

I think I might have figured it out and it of course my own fault. In my typical genius fashion, prior to the holidays, I had enacted a policy on our Jamf system that would run daily and perform maintenance tasks. I suspect one of those tasks was to clear the font cache. The policy was set to run once per day so as soon as users would reboot, the cache would be regenerated and things would work until the next day. I disabled the policy yesterday so I'm looking forward to seeing if the issue happens again but I'm betting it'll be back to normal. Thanks for all your help!

I'll bet you're not going to really tell everyone the source of the problem. Congrats on finding a solution.

 

[chrfr]

I think I might have figured it out and it of course my own fault. In my typical genius fashion, prior to the holidays, I had enacted a policy on our Jamf system that would run daily and perform maintenance tasks. I suspect one of those tasks was to clear the font cache. The policy was set to run once per day so as soon as users would reboot, the cache would be regenerated and things would work until the next day. I disabled the policy yesterday so I'm looking forward to seeing if the issue happens again but I'm betting it'll be back to normal. Thanks for all your help!

There's really no daily maintenance tasks that need to be run. I'd entirely disable all of whatever that policy was before it causes more problems.