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Fonts Not Displaying on Some But Not All Sites

  • 4 ŋuɖoɖowo
  • 1 masɔmasɔ sia le esi
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  • Nuɖoɖo mlɔetɔ info5858

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My desktop Mac suddenly (July 28) quit displaying page specified fonts, in some - not all - instances, using Inspector reveals affected sites defaulting to Helvetica Last Resort, or failing to display Open Sans via gstatic.com. For comparison, my laptop - same FF v.78.12.0esr, using the same (advanced - default) fonts and colors settings - displays everything properly, as do those same sites on mobile. This is a local problem.

Those sites affected work fine using Chrome, Safari, which indicates system level fonts are loading properly.

Of the sites affected, one thing in common seems to be that they are WordPress/PHP dynamic sites.

I use FontExplorerX font management, which has been stable for years. There aren't any reported conflicts.

Application and system font caches have been flushed.

Firefox has been freshened.

I feel like this may be a corrupted prefs file somewhere, but have no idea how to proceed.

Attached images show different page display results using same search term in Google, DuckDuckGo, and two sites that are affected.

My desktop Mac suddenly (July 28) quit displaying page specified fonts, in some - not all - instances, using Inspector reveals affected sites defaulting to Helvetica Last Resort, or failing to display Open Sans via gstatic.com. For comparison, my laptop - same FF v.78.12.0esr, using the same (advanced - default) fonts and colors settings - displays everything properly, as do those same sites on mobile. This is a local problem. Those sites affected work fine using Chrome, Safari, which indicates system level fonts are loading properly. Of the sites affected, one thing in common seems to be that they are WordPress/PHP dynamic sites. I use FontExplorerX font management, which has been stable for years. There aren't any reported conflicts. Application and system font caches have been flushed. Firefox has been freshened. I feel like this may be a corrupted prefs file somewhere, but have no idea how to proceed. Attached images show different page display results using same search term in Google, DuckDuckGo, and two sites that are affected.
Screen ƒe photowo kpe ɖe eŋu

Ŋuɖoɖo si wotia

Problem solved.

  1. Cleaned up FontExplorerX database, removed duplicate fonts, emptied app, user, and system caches. The only remaining anomalies are an occasional glitch displaying characters styled as italic.
  2. Ran Disk Utility Repair Permissions several times, which seems to have fixed the FF display of WordPress sites.
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All Replies (4)

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Do you have local copies installed of these problematic fonts ?

This can happen if you have these fonts installed in a location that is blocked by the sandbox on Mac. The solution would be to move these fonts to system fonts.

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Not sure what you mean. The fonts not showing properly (in FF) run the gamut, some sites still work fine, others don't. Considering that most sites run some form of @font-face the number of fonts that could be causing the problem would be significant, if that were the problem.

The problem is confined to FF, and doesn't affect Chrome or Safari, nor does it affect my laptop FF.

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I seem to have two issues: 1) FF not loading styled fonts, but Chrome does. 2) FF not interpreting styled fonts in Wordpress, but Chrome does. I'm working through the former, and some issues seem to relate to FontExplorer and Apple System fonts.

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Ɖɔɖɔɖo si wotia

Problem solved.

  1. Cleaned up FontExplorerX database, removed duplicate fonts, emptied app, user, and system caches. The only remaining anomalies are an occasional glitch displaying characters styled as italic.
  2. Ran Disk Utility Repair Permissions several times, which seems to have fixed the FF display of WordPress sites.