Yosemite causes font problem in Chrome

Question

Does ANYBODY know how to get fonts to display correctly in Chrome since the update to Yosemite? I so regret doing the update because all my Helvetica displays as an A inside a square. I have searched in all friggin forums about this and nobody has a solution that works. Please holler if you are a superstar and have a solution.
<3
Angela

Answer 1

Would you work around this by keeping on doing the sudo every time you restart the computer
No, as you're then just patching a recurring issue every day. Something is causing the problem.
When clearing the caches initially works and then comes back, it's probably either corrupt fonts, or third party fonts you've installed that conflict with some of the newly installed system fonts.
Since you just recently installed Yosemite, it's a pretty good bet the OS X supplied fonts are not the issue. That leaves third party fonts you've installed. Create a new folder on the desktop. With Finder showing as the active app at the upper left next to the Apple logo, hold the Option key and choose Go > Library from the menu bar. This open the Library folder in your user account. Open the Fonts folder. If there are any fonts in that folder, move all of them to the new folder you created on the desktop.
Next, launch Font Book. With FB in the foreground, choose the option on the menu bar to Restore Standard Fonts. This will move any third party fonts in the root /Library/Fonts/ folder to a new folder right next to it named Fonts (Removed). The only ones remaining will be those installed by OS X. It will also perform this move to the /System/Library/Fonts/ folder. All that will be left as active fonts in the three main Library folders after that (system, root library, user account) will be those installed by Yosemite.
Font Book is not a happy camper when fonts are manually removed. It will almost always corrupt its database. So the last steps are to clear Font Book's database, and once again, clear all font cache files from the system.
1. Restart your Mac and immediately hold down the Shift key when you hear the startup chime to boot into Safe Mode. Keep holding the Shift key until you see a progress bar towards the bottom of the screen. You can let go of the Shift key at that point. Yosemite is a bit different. Whether it's a Safe Mode boot or a normal one, you get the same progress bar. It just takes longer to get to the desktop in Safe Mode. So hold the Shift key until you get to the desktop.
OS X asks you to log in (you will get this screen on a Safe Mode boot even if your Mac is set to automatically log in). Let the Mac finish booting to the desktop and then restart normally. This will clear Font Book's database and the cache files of the user account you logged into in Safe Mode.
2. Since the system font cache files are not cleared by a Safe Mode startup, repeat the steps you performed above:
Close all running applications. From an administrator account, open the Terminal app and enter the following command. You can also copy/paste it from here into the Terminal window:
sudo atsutil databases -remove
Terminal will then ask for your admin password. As you type, it will not show anything, so be sure to enter it correctly.
This removes all font cache files. Both for the system and the current logged in user account. After running the command, close Terminal and immediately restart your Mac.
That should stop any issues with fonts being displayed incorrectly in all apps. After that, you need to determine which of the third party fonts you have are causing the problem. Use either the Fonts folder in your user account, or create a new folder in the root /Library/Fonts/ folder. You could just name it "test". Drop about 10 fonts into your new folder, or the initially empty user account Fonts folder, at a time. Use the system for a while and see if the problem returns. Keep adding fonts a handful at a time. When the problem reappears, you'll know at least one of the fonts you just reactivated is bad. Pull those back out and once again follow the two steps above. Keep whittling down your third party fonts by means of elimination until you've clearly identified the culprit(s) and delete those fonts.