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Fonts not rendered, only ?????

  • 2 replies
  • 1 has this problem
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  • Last reply by moz4

moz4
moz4
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Hello together. I'm experiencing a strange font problem and hopefully somewone can give me a hint. My system: macOS 10.15.7, Firefox 83 and FF Dev 84.0b2 Basically, on some websites fonts are not rendered. Please check the screenshots. This strange behaviour only occures with one user (the standard user), only with those browsers (safari and chrome work well), and the problem does not affect the firefox interface. I have re-installed the apps, i deleted the profiles, i cleared the font caches... nothing helped. Does anybody of you guys has an idea? Thank you in advance and best regards b.

Hello together. I'm experiencing a strange font problem and hopefully somewone can give me a hint. My system: macOS 10.15.7, Firefox 83 and FF Dev 84.0b2 Basically, on some websites fonts are not rendered. Please check the screenshots. This strange behaviour only occures with one user (the standard user), only with those browsers (safari and chrome work well), and the problem does not affect the firefox interface. I have re-installed the apps, i deleted the profiles, i cleared the font caches... nothing helped. Does anybody of you guys has an idea? Thank you in advance and best regards b.
Attached screenshots

All Replies (2)

cor-el
cor-el
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  • Top 10 Contributor
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This can happen if the font that is requested is corrupted or otherwise can't be accessed, possibly because the font is under control of a third-party font manager and is located in a non standard location. If Firefox isn't able to access the requested font then it falls back to a 'last resort' font that shows all glyphs as a '?' or an 'A'.

You can check in the Rules tab in the right panel in the Inspector what font-family is used for selected text to see what font this is about. You can check in the Font tab in the right panel in the Inspector what font is actually used because Firefox might be using a different font than specified by the website.

You can check in Font Book for font issues like corrupted and duplicate fonts.

moz4
moz4 Question owner
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Hello cor-el Thank you very much for your answer. This helped me a lot, nevertheless, I couldn't resolve the problem.

According to inspector, the missing font is Arial. I checked it twice: the font files are located in the correct system folder, and the font is activated.

But I made another oberservation: After restarting FF and performing a google search, in the first moment the page loads correctly, and only after a few second the glyphs turn strange (not questionmarks, but slightly dislocated). Firefox is becoming extremly slow. With the next google search, the questionmarks aka LastResort are back...

Do you have another Idea? I think if the font itself is corrupt, why does is work well with another user?

Best regards b.