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TMO Quick Tip - Fixing Garbled Type in Mail and Safari

by , 7:30 AM EST, December 22nd, 2006

If English is your first language, but Safari and Mail display text in some language that looks like it came from a planet on the other side of the galaxy, odds are it's time to do a little font house cleaning on your Mac. Luckily, fixing the problem usually involves just clearing your font cache.

This very problem came up just a few days ago when I was trouble shooting some font issues with The Graphic Reporter's Lesa Snider. In this case, we were looking at an email that read like R2-D2 speaks.


This text is supposed to be in English.

FontNuke, a free font cache cleaner for Mac OS X 10.4, followed by a reboot, cleared the problem up and returned Mail to a human-speaking application.


FontNuke clears your font cache without any hassleEnglish.

You can download FontNuke from Jake Pietrykowski's Web site, but it is hosted on a .Mac page, so go easy on him.

Jeff Gamet is TMO's Morning Editor and Reviews Editor. He lectures, teaches and speaks on Mac OS X and design-related topics, and is the author of The Designer's Guide to Mac OS X from Peachpit Press.

if you have tips or tricks to share, or Mac-related questions you want answered.

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Observer Comments

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Close Name:Guest
Fri Dec 22, 2006 9:24 am Subject: Another fix

If cleaning the font cache doesn't clear up that problem, search for a font called "Helvetica Fractions" and delete it.


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Close Name:Guest
Fri Dec 22, 2006 7:58 pm Subject: Re: Another fix

Actually Helvetica Fractions is only one such font to cause this problem. I've seen Helvetica Cyrillic get chosen as well as a few other Helvetica variants. I'm using Font Explorer on my system and work and there are times it becomes the infamous "which helvetica will it choose today" syndrome.

I'm half of a mind that Apple needs to get a better license for Helvetica with Linotype and create "Apple Helvetica" to alleviate this problem (make Safari require this and only this anytime it receives a request for Helvetica or they could build this new Helvetica in as part of the WebKit (at least in theory it should be possible) and maybe then when any application requests Helvetica from the WebKit alone, this new Helvetica would be used which should solve the issue).


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Close Name:Gweilo Posts: 1 Joined: 08 May 2007
Tue May 08, 2007 6:25 am Subject:

All of the above fixed my issues in Entourage and Safari but I still get garbled up text on Dashboard Widgets ........ Does anyone have some ideas?


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