Jumbled Font

I have a brand new iMac with Leopard installed. I have a problem that is getting progressively worse and more frequent. It started with websites on Safari having jumbled headlines and missing letters and has spread to my emails - with some of my latest mail having missing CAPS. Is anybody else experiencing this?

Sorry that you're having troubles but what makes you think it's a QuickTime issue?

Similar Messages

Jumbled fonts in Address Book, Safari and Mail apps

The fonts become jumbled (just weird characters, where names in the Address book should be and in fine print on web pages and the To/From boxes in Mail) in these OS apps after the computer has been on and to fix it I have to restart or if that doesn't work, throw away the Cache folder and sometimes the Preferences folder in the Library on my HD
Is this a glitch in System X? I've had the same thing happen to my G5 at work.
What is the fix?

The fonts become jumbled (just weird characters,
where names in the Address book should be and in fine
print on web pages and the To/From boxes in Mail)
The usual fix is to get rid of bad fonts and clean your font caches (use Fontfinagler for caches, use google to find it). The most common bad fonts are Helvetica Fractions and Times Phonetic. Send me a screen shot if you want (click on my name for the address).

Jumbled Fonts in Mail and Browser

I am having problems with the fonts on my iMac with 10.4 in Apple Mail and Safari.
The fonts look all jumbled up, a bit like greek. I read up it could be the font cache files. I used Onyx to delete the font cache files, but this did not resolve it.
Does anyone else know how to resolve this?
Problem is I don't have the system discs for this unit, so if there is another solution other than clean install that would be great.
Here is what it looks like
http://img146.imageshack.us/img146/7132/jumbledfont.jpg

Tom,
My posts were very badly written because of fever, sorry. However, I can't agree with your simple evaluation of my competence to offer an alternative test and fix, or competence in general. Here's a summary of my posts.
1. The internet community recommends UTF-8 for browsers, e-mail, and it's being recommended by many for files. Because of the large number of processes a letter passes through on route to the printer, the problem can be a strange error, as the thread referred to showed.
2. Apple Mail can display strange errors when forwarding mail. Mail is still primitive: left & right double quotes are represented by a single mark, single quotes are as well; and Italic is replaced by slanted Roman (begun by Adrian Frutiger). Mail will improve.
3. In case UTF-8 was being used, and it's second plane, Cyrillic, was printed instead of the first plane of ASCII Roman because of damage to the module that converts it, I offered a test for this. I see no problem with the test. The keyboard was in apropos, and the RFC was misinterpreted. Neither error did much harm, and I correct suggesting a new keyboard here.
4. I corrected misinterpreting the RFC.
My approach to reading such posts would be to clarify the confusion, as above, and to note that trying a new keyboard had no purpose.
Your post repeated BDAqua's appropriate, initial step, without details. This is a good maintenance activity, which should be done after installing a new font. However, if two fonts have the same internal name (a font conflict), isn't an error message displayed? This is why I offered an alternative possibility.
I doubt the OP knows what a 'junk font' is (I've never encountered one in forty years of collecting free fonts similar to the classics). I have hundred of free text fonts, and all were verified. BDAqua's post would have found your declared error.
I cannot contribute for at least two weeks, possibly longer. However, I suggest your posts be kinder and more explanatory in the future. Bye.
Bruce Bathurst
Retired Computer Consultant

Arial embedded font displaying jumbled on another user's machine

I have a PDF document that uses an Arial embedded font and it looks fine on my machine, but looks like this on one of my end user's machines:
In researching this problem all the advice points to a problem with the font, but it's just the common Arial font and it is listed as embedded. Or at least, I think it is, Arial shows up in the font list for the PDF properties 3 times, and if I use the Touchup Text tool, select the text and look at Properties, it says "Cannot embed font" although both embed and subset checkboxes are checked and disabled.
Can anyone help please?
-VG_mnet
P.s. I should have mentioned that it shows jumbled on my machine too when the user emailed it to me. I'm on Adobe Pro version 9.
Here is the font list on the PDF properties:

Thank you again for your help Bill@VT and CtDave. I did play around with the Distiller but I don't think those options help me much since I do not use either of the options to create the PDF that you mention Bill. I actually am usually starting with an existing PDF template (that has our logos and a demo title) and then I fill in the rest of the paragraphs, charts, labels and form fields. So my understanding (now that I have explored) is that the Distiller is used for converting a postscript file to a pdf. I already have a PDF tho. Just for yuks, I saved my PDF as a .ps and ran it through the distiller - it correctly embedded all my fonts, but my form fields were all gone.
So I moved on to Plan B and looked at the preflights that Dave referred to. After looking at a lot of instructional web pages that all told me the Preflights were of the View or Tools menu, I finally found it under Advanced->Print Production->Preflights. I chose the option to Embed fonts (even if text is invisible), and ran it through. It seemed to work great and maintained my form fields. Most of my fonts are also now embedded as I had hoped. I think this will be the way we move forward with all the existing PDFs we have in our system, but I did notice that one font still didn't get embedded. One of the Arial's (the 1st CID in the screenshot above) is still listed as not embedded even though the other fonts listed are practically identical and are embedded. This may be a problem on just this one PDF, and the other PDFs in my system appear to not have this issue when I run the preflight, so I'll keep playing with this one PDF, but does anyone have a theory as to why the preflight wasn't able to embed that one CID font?
Thanks again! You have both been helpful and I've learned some new tricks!
-VG

Characters all jumbled up in most fonts

Why is it that most of my fonts appear jumbled up or with extremely tight kerning when i try them out in Keynote? Most of my fonts, which work fine in every other application are coming across this way in Keynote????

I've got the exact same problem. It just happened to me for the first time today. Keynote 5.03, happening on only one of my three production Macs. All updated to latest versions of iWork and MacOS. I've been using the same Keynote file for months on a digital signage rig with no problems until this morning.
Expected: http://img.skitch.com/20100617-b41h47mpd3296snunu1517uhpi.pdf
Problem: http://img.skitch.com/20100617-k3i8ugpj2xnhdnxsjhwn6u1613.png
I'm using professional fonts. Any ideas?
Thanks in advance,
moo

Fonts jumbled on certain web pages

On certain sites, the font overlaps certain elements of the page.
http://i.imgur.com/IRI9JMk.png
http://i.imgur.com/y1snpC8.png
This happens in both chrome and firefox.
Could this be a bug with the acceleration method used by xf86-video-intel? I recall Pacman saying that I could change the acceleration method from 'sna' back to 'uxa', but didn't see any reason to do that.
Last edited by thrashrokz33 (2013-10-14 22:24:52)

thrashrokz33 wrote:
On certain sites, the font overlaps certain elements of the page.
http://i.imgur.com/IRI9JMk.png
http://i.imgur.com/y1snpC8.png
This happens in both chrome and firefox.
Could this be a bug with the acceleration method used by xf86-video-intel? I recall Pacman saying that I could change the acceleration method from 'sna' back to 'uxa', but didn't see any reason to do that.
No, it's not a bug. I think you are just missing some "exotic" fonts. I believe the second example is from WolframAlpha, my browser has the same problem there. I don't want to say that, but you could solve this problem by installing some MS fonts.
You can look here https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php … 0#p1161110 or here https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/MS_Fonts

Why does text on certain portions of websites, usually when adjacent text contains special characters, become jumbled into seemingly random sets of characters that are not in any way jumbled when viewing the source of the webpage? How can I fix this?

When viewing most text on most websites, it displays properly. However, there are two instances where text will either tend to, or consistently, become jumbled into a mess of seemingly random characters. Oddly enough, these seemingly random characters are not, in fact, random. The same weird character will be used to replace the same regular English text character consistently across the entire area that has been jumbled.
The two instances where this tends to occur most often, or consistently in some cases, are, first, when a paragraph or particular section of formatted text contains special characters, such as Chinese or Japanese characters, or accented letters. When this happens, usually the paragraph that contains the special characters is completely jumbled, while the rest of the text on the page will have intermittent jumbling on a word or two. Most often, the word "the" is jumbled in this case.
The second instance where this happens is when a website uses specially formatted text in some form or another. I, not being an expert at web development, am not sure what kind of formatting causes it, but I can provide consistent examples in lieu of my experience:
- Example 1:
[http://img408.imageshack.us/img408/9564/firefoxcharencodingissu.jpg]
Example 1 shows a portion of a screen-shot of the website "Joystiq.com". Every single article title on the front page of this blog is consistently jumbled, while the text of the article itself remains untouched. Please note that when this jumbled text is highlighted, it is visible un-jumbled in the right-click menu as well as in the source code of the page. Other consistent instances can be found within many search fields on various websites. For instance, the search bar located at the top right of "Kotaku.com" consistently displays jumbled characters both on its default text of "Search" and on any text that is typed into the search box itself.
- Example 2:
[http://img822.imageshack.us/img822/9564/firefoxcharencodingissu.jpg]
Example 2 shows both the jumbling of the paragraph containing the character "☆" as well as the subsequent peppering of the rest of the article's text with small jumbled words. Below this is the DOM Source of the selected text which shows how the text itself is being rendered properly within the site's source. Additionally, for convenience, I have edited on to the bottom of the image a small snippet of what the search bar on the same page looks like. Notice how the grayed-out text that normally would read "Search" is instead jumbled.
This issue has been plaguing my browser for the past year or so, and I had hoped that it would go away with subsequent Firefox updates. It has not gone away.
Thank you for reading! Please help!

This issue can be caused by an old bitmap version of the Helvetica or Geneva font or (bitmap) fonts that Firefox can't display in that size.
Firefox can't display some old bitmap fonts in a larger size and displays gibberish instead.
You can test that by zooming out (View > Zoom > Zoom Out, Ctrl -) to make the text smaller.
Uninstall (remove) all variants of that not working font to make Firefox use another font or see if you can find a True type version that doesn't show the problem.
There have also been fonts with a Chinese name reported that identify themselves as Helvetica, so check that as well.
Use this test to see if the Helvetica font is causing it (Copy & Paste the code in the location bar and press Enter):
<pre><nowiki>data:text/html,
Helvetica abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ 
Helvetica Neue abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
</nowiki></pre>
You should reset the network.http prefs that show user set on the about:config page. 
Not all websites support http pipelining and if they do not then you can have issues with images or other problems.
See also http://kb.mozillazine.org/Images_or_animations_do_not_load#First_steps

Font problem with MX under Snow Leopard

Anybody know what might cause an app built with Director MX not to display an installed (not embedded) custom font under Snow Leopard?
The program was built quite some time ago but was tested under previous Mac OS X.x versions and worked fine. What might have changed that could cause this problem?
Complicating this is that I don't have Snow Leopard myself to test it directly, but here's what I do know:
The font is definitely installed and available to other apps.
Everything else about the app works fine.

I noticed the same jumbled text problem.
When I went to look at Font Book, I see that those fonts are no longer installed. It must've happened when I loaded Snow Leopard last weekend.
Anyway, I went to reinstall fonts, and I see I've got a bunch that got uninstalled. But when I try to reinstall them, like Calisto and Caligula to name the first couple I tried, Font Book reports that there were serious errors when trying to load them.
Does anyone have insights into the vague message: "System Validation" as the serious problem? I don't see a way to get more details about the problem than that.

I am having trouble getting access to fonts on hard drive. In particular Helvetica Neue Black. It seems that since HelveNeu.dfont is a system font Font Book does not give me the option to activate HelveticaNeuBlack.

We recently started using Font Book instead of Suitcase Fusion for our font management program. We are unable to activate our postscript type 1 font (Helvetica Neue Black) It seems since hel neu is a system dfont that Font Book thinks we already have it activated but HelvNeueBlack is not part of dfont. So even though I have it in my fonts folder the font is grayed out and am unable to activate. I might add that HelveBlack is also a problem. I've read the article by Kurt Lang on Font Management. I followed his directions on how to remove dfonts from system but caused more problems than it solved. I would appreciate a certified way to handle these particular fonts. Do I need to purchase the Open Type fonts to solve problem.

What I did to fix was remove Helv Fractions that cleared up the problem.
It's been quite a while since I've seen that one come up. When you mentioned that some of the type looked like jumbled fractions, that should have jogged my memory. Yes, Helvetica Fractions is long known to be a bad font. Delete it from the hard drive and never reinstall it.
The HelvNeuBlack and HelvBlack fonts you sent are indeed creating conflicts. Here are screen shots of their internal names. HelvBlack first, and HelvNeuBlack second.
In Helvetica Black, the menu name is just Helvetica, which leaves nowhere for the regular Helvetica font to display in your font lists. It also then creates a cross reference between the two fonts. It is also reporting two other different names to the OS for the same font. Helvetica Black, and Helvetica-Black. You can technically get away with doing that, but it's bad practice.
Helvetica Neue Black is the same type of bad naming. The menu name is just Helvetica Neue, which leaves nowhere for the real Helvetica Neue to go in your menu lists. Then they rather oddly threw in Helvetica 95 Black for the full name, as opposed to HelveticaNeue-Black for the other two spots.
Just some really sloppy work here by someone for what I would guess were Type 1 PostScript fonts converted to Mac legacy TrueType. If you don't have the software to fix the names, the only good suggestion is to throw these fonts out and purchase new ones from a vendor who builds fonts correctly. And while they're kind of pricey, that means either Adobe or Linotype.

Font Book 2.0.3

I am trying to find out if my Font Book has Crashed. My Illustrator all of a sudden would stop responding, uninstalled it and reinstalled. But I get the following error when I tried to create a PDF:
The font Futura could not be imbedded in the PDF document because of licensing restrictions. Stroked key will not be visible. It says this about all of the fonts in my document. And they are messed up on the screen also.
In word, it takes forever to load, it seems to stall for awhile when it gets the Font info. And when I look in the drop down menu for the fonts, they are all jumbled on top of each other, and when I scroll down to the bottom, it has weird distortion stuff, nothing that even looks like a font.
A few months back I downloaded Suitcase by Extensis, but after it installed, I had nothing in my drop down menus for my windows, The drop down menu was empty, I did not even have options for shutting down the computer. It was that way in all my program windows. So I used App Zapper to remove it, but there were plug ins left behind in Illustrator & Indesign. So I manually removed them, and the apps seemed to work fine till 3 weeks ago, when I got the Black Screen on my computer. I wasn't even doing anything, I walked away came back and it was there. Took 2 reboots to get it up, but when I went into any app that has font options it would either not load due to not responding, or it would take forever for it to load.
Also, get some kind of weird language on all the Adobe stuff I have installed on here, the screen says it is displaying in English, but it is definitely not English.

Thanx for the reply, although for future reference I prefer warm fuzzy emails, that do not make me want to cry...
Sorry, didn't intend to bring you to tears. It is better to post here though since you may get help from quite a few knowledgeable people.
I am a PC person, so this is my first full time MAC position, which I am not finding rewarding.
This is unusual. Macs are normally very stable. It's hard to tell from here of course what may have led to so much trouble. I still think your first best bet is an Archive and Install. Find the gray OS X installation disk that came with your Mac. If the copy of Tiger you have installed is a retail disk (black with a silver X on it), use that.
For safety's sake, you should first create a backup of your hard drive to an external, or other internal drive if you have one.
Insert the OS X installation disk in your drive. A window will appear for it when it mounts. Double click the icon to install OS X. The Mac will reboot to the CD/DVD for you. When it's ready, you'll first get the option of which language to use. Continue to the next screen. I can't remember how quickly the option you need comes up, but I think it's after which hard drive you choose to install OS X to. Anyway, look for a button that brings up a choice as to how OS X is installed. You'll find a choice for Archive and Install. Make sure to also select the option to preserve your settings and preferences. Continue with the installation.
When it's done, you'll have fresh install os OS X on the hard drive. Apply all available updates. You'll also find a folder marked Previous System. That's everything the Archive and Install replaced. You can trash that. That will take care of any problems with the OS itself.
I had Illustrator loaded previously, using all of the same fonts, embedding all fonts, including Futura, and this is the first time I ever saw this message. I do not have this message is InDesign, instead I get "You might not be able to print w/.... or stroke its characters because the fonts outline file is missing". And then when I go to PDF it says it could not embed the fonts due to the missing "Outline File". What the heck is an "Outline File"???? And how do I get one?
Ah, so the Illustrator message is probably incorrect. On the PC, I'm sure you're aware that a Type 1 PostScript font is made up of two files for each type face. One with a .pfm extension, and the other with .pfb. Mac Type 1 PostScript fonts are made up of two parts. One file is a suitcase containing all of the low res bitmap screen fonts. The rest are the outline printer fonts. As an example, here's Adobe Garamond.
Adobe Garamond
AGarBol
AGarBolIta
AGarIta
AGarReg
AGarSem
AGarSemIta
The first file which I highlighted in green is the font suitcase of bitmap screen fonts. The rest are the outline printer fonts.
1) The files for a Type 1 PostScript font must have both the screen and printer fonts for a given set in order to work. They also must be in the same folder.
2) The suitcase of bitmap fonts will work alone, but output will be terrible since the system will print the fonts using the 72 dpi screen fonts in the suitcase if the outline portions are missing.
3) Having only the outline fonts will not work. You can see the fonts, but they will not load. That's not a problem with Font Book, Suitcase or other font manager. None of them, nor the system itself will load outline fonts from a Type 1 PostScript font without the matching suitcase of screen fonts present.
So in your case, you have the suitcase of bitmap screen fonts, but not the vector outline font for the typeface you're using. Hence the message, "...because the fonts outline file is missing". Since so many of the fonts you're trying to use won't embed, you probably only have the screen fonts for all of them.

JavaScript displays oversize fonts in multiple browsers (OS 10.4.10)

My web site uses JavaScript for tabbed dropdown menus and scrolling type. Some users with OS 10.4.10 report that the type displayed by the JavaScript is oversize. For tabbed menus this causes the row of tabs to become too long so that the last tab(s) of the line wrap to a new line, causing them to become inaccessible. This problem does not occur for all users of OS 10.4.10 -- the tabs display properly for some and not for others. For those users with the problem, it occurs with Safari, Camino, Firefox and Omniweb, but not the old IE. I have tested the page on Safari, Opera, Netscape, Camino & Firefox on Mac (10.3.9), as well as Win IE, Netscape and Firefox, but cannot reproduce the problem. While so far I've only gotten reports of this occuring for OS 10.4.10 users, it has occurred on non-Intel as well as Intel Macs.
The web page is at: http://pathwaysoflight.org
Any ideas on the cause and resolution?

Robert,
For what it's worth...
I viewed your site using updated versions of Camino, Firefox, Safari, Shiira, Opera and IE. With the exception of IE 5.2.3, I was able to reproduce the trouble in each browser when I set a minimum font size to anything above number 11. Setting the minimum font to 12 caused the "Links" menu to get crowded out; setting to 14 would cause multiple menus to become jumbled. The problem occurred whether my display's resolution was set to 800 x 600, or 1024 x 768. The good news was that in each case resetting the minimum font size (within the respective browsers' preferences) to 11 solved the problem.
Viewing the site in IE, which doesn't feature a minimum font size setting option, presented its own difficulties: mousing over any of the menu items expanded the drop-down menus as expected, but moving the mouse away from, or clicking outside the menu area, would fail to collapse the menus. The only workaround for me was to refresh the page and try to keep the mouse pointer away from the menus.
A couple things to look into perhaps...
Good luck!
Andrew99

I have installed acrobat on my computer and when I try to read a PDF fille it is jumbled and I can't read the file

I can'tead PDF files when I try to I get jumbled lettrs only

Hey johnw25259354,
Could you please let me know what version of Adobe Acrobat and OS are you using.
How were the PDFs created and check if the fonts were embedded (under File> Properties> Font)
Please let me know.
Regards,
Anubha

Corrupted / missing fonts - Adobe Acrobat Pro 9.5.5

When I create a PDF using Acrobat Pro 9.5.5 from a web page (using IE 11 on Windows 7) I will often have a resulting PDF file where the letters are jumbled symbols and not the actual letters. Or sometimes I get the error:
%%[ ProductName: Distiller ]%%
48ufllv not found, using Courier.
%%[Page: 1]%%
%%[ Error: invalidfont; OffendingCommand: xshow ]%%
Stack:
-dict-
-file-
%%[ Flushing: rest of job (to end-of-file) will be ignored ]%%
%%[ Warning: PostScript error. No PDF file produced. ] %%
When that happens no PDF file is created.
Is there a way for me to fix this without uninstalling and reinstalling. This install is part of the Creative Suite so that's a lot of disks for me to uninstall and then reinstall.
thanks!!

Under the settings file, you can open up and go to the font page. You can then select to print even if there font cannot be embedded. Something like that might work.

Why do I have a font problem in my FROM and TO lines?

I have converted this week from Entourage to Apple Mail. I'm getting used to it, but really miss the formatting capabilities of Entourage. Given Apple's mastery of fonts and typography, how did Apple Mail end up being so basic?
But more immediate is a font conflict I seem to be having on the FROM and TO lines of each email. On my screen those lines appear blank, with the names instead showing up on the SUBJECT line, all jumbled together. Completely unreadable.
I am using Suitcase Fusion 12.1.1, and I suspect this might be part of my problem. But has anyone out there seen this before? I'd rather not start playing with Fusion if I can avoid it!
Thanks...

Thank you for the speedy reply, Allan. Yes, I wondered if I was looking at a font conflict. How do I best tackle that? I thought I understood Suitcase Fusion, but I have to admit that I'm wondering if I caused more harm than good. I cannot just simply close it, since it seems to have moved my original fonts, and I am then left without the ones I need.
Maybe this is no longer an Apple Mail question, but how do I best move forward in assessing and resolving this?
Thanks again
Lorne

Printing to PDF-text is changed because of font

I've been trying to print files to PDF, but everytime I do so using the Segoe UI font, the text is distorted into a jumble of letters in a different font. Is there anyway to prevent/fix this? Included is an image of a test PDF I created for this post. The top line was written in Segoe UI.
System Info:
Windows 8.1 OS
Office 2003
Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional, included with Adobe CS3

If you use ctrl-D you can check the embedding of the fonts. I suspect the font is not embedded and is not being displayed correctly as a result. You might try using the Press or Print job settings that try to embed all fonts and see if that resolves the problem.
I suspect the problem is related to running AA8 on WIn8.1. However check for the embedding of the fonts. Also check to see if you are set to use local fonts or not (you may have to go to the manual under help for AA8 to find out how to select "local fonts." I am not near my AA8 machine right now. I tried everything I could with AA9 and Win7 to create the problem. I made a WORD file that looked like your's and printed to the Adobe PDF printer. I could not get the problem to come up. I do have the Segoe UI on my system. The result I got is shown below:
I even did this with the Smallest file size and with/without local fonts selected. The only font embedded was the Courier.
As I said, I suspect the Win8.1 installation. Have you updated Acrobat to the latest version to try to maintain the best compatibility possible with Win8.1?

Jumbled Font

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