I'm having this strange but debilitating font problem in Safari since upgrading to Leopard. How do I troubleshoot?

I checked Safari's preferences and saw this:



And when I opened the font browser and selected helvetica I was shown "Helvetica fractions" or some unreadable derivative font like that. It appears Safari is mishandling the installed fonts.

I can try disabling non-critical Helvetica font variants (a hack), but I'm still curious as to what the root cause is, and how to avoid it in the future. And why is this only happening in Safari?

I had a similar issue where a Helvetica with an incredibly high leading sneaked its way into the System folder and wreaked havoc on all websites/software that used Helvetica as the default. It looks like you have a similar problem with some graffiti font taking precedence over system fonts. Google specifies Arial first on the Google Analytics homepage, so I'd go through your fonts looking for any suspiciously named or new "Arial" fonts, or just something called Graffiti, etc, then delete it.

Very practical advice. I'll do that!

Helvetica Fractions was the same font that was giving me trouble. I'm not sure why, but the system seems to give a higher ranking over regular Helvetica. We'd all installed it at work and it was the bane of our existence trying to track down and delete the font over the next week.

I Like the Linotype product referred to above, but I'd also take a look at the Apple-provided Font Book application to see if you can disable extra fonts and fix the issue.

You also might try using Font Book's feature "Validate Font" under the File menu. Select your whole list of fonts and run that to make sure you don't have any corrupt fonts loaded.

Oh, out of curiosity, Thor. Did you install Office for mac? Some people with Leopard and Office for mac had similar problems, I think. I was trying to find where I read about them, but I couldn't. However if I recall correctly, Office did screw up some fonts.

I do have Office for Mac, which I clean installed after my upgrade to Leopard and it's the most bloody aggravating programme, it is causing all sorts of trouble with fonts, even in my Adobe Professional and iWeb, it crashes and then tells me I don't have system fonts when clearly I do.

My only work around which seems so far to be working was to trash the prefs file for my font folder, trash the font folder and reinstall. I'm still holding my breath on this one. I understand there will be a new Office for Mac next year.

I do know anytime I've upgraded my OS, I have to re-install Office otherwise it's a real nuisance app.

I had similar font display problems in Safari and iWeb and I went to Font Book and disabled one font called "Brady Bunch" that had somehow gotten into my "web collection". This cleared up my problem.

Delete jungle font from your font book. Problem solved.

Yes, that is "Jungle" font.

Yep... disabling the Jungle fonts did it for me.

I have a similar problem, but it's not just in Safari. It sometimes shows up in Firefox. And dialog boxes.

Mainly I see it in that the "Do you want to logout?" window. It displays in a random font--sometimes just hard to read, sometimes blank, sometimes not even an English font.

I've been assuming it's a font problem, but since the font shown varies, it didn't seem to be a single font's problem.

Basically you have to uninstall the offending fonts. I don't think there is a way to remove the problem and retain the use of the font. Especially this "Jungle" font, it seems to be a sh**ty font that for whatever reason is messing up the system.

1. Uninstall the font
2. Repair Disk Permissions
3. Restart Computer

This should take care of it, if not, you're worse off than me.

I had this problem. Uninstalling all helvetica fractions cleared it up for me.

I had problem with the Brady Bunch font being in the Web collection. It caused problem with the Flock browser even when disabled. Had to trash it. I think I downloaded and installed this font, but did not add it to the Web collection. There's a new version named Brady Bunch Remastered. Wonder if it will cause the same problem.