fontmacosupgrade
When I login to iTunes or Skype the fonts all show up as boxes.
No fonts were removed on installed; none are disabled and all the normal ones show up. Doesn't happen on any web site; only seems to be locally installed programs.
Uninstalled and reinstalled and programs still don't work.
As Chris Redman said, the fonts are fine.
To access the glyphs in this font, you'll need to use the Character Palette.
Follow the directions he gave to show the Character Palette, then click on the Action button in the upper left corner of the window and choose Customize List…. Scroll down in the list and choose Dingbats, like shown in the image below:
Then choose the Dingbats category in the main window, then choose the appropriate font in the popup menu in the center column. The lightning bolt is shown in the image below.
As you can see, the Unicode value of that glyph is U+F07E, which is way the heck out of the range that you're going to be able to reach with your keyboard alone.
P.S. Both BBEdit and TextWrangler are Carbon-based apps. (Well, they could be hybrid, but the majority of the text-handling appears to be Carbon (HITextView?)).
Toggling LCD font smoothing (subpixel rendering) should have an immediate effect on the System Preferences window with most displays.
LCD font smoothing is not enabled automatically on some LCD displays though. You might be able to force them to use it with defaults write -g AppleFontSmoothing -int 2, which corresponds to the pre-10.6 medium setting or enabling LCD font smoothing on most displays.
10.5 used to allow choosing from two additional text rendering settings, light and strong. If the default was light before you upgraded to 10.8, you can restore it with defaults write -g AppleFontSmoothing -int 1.
High Resolution Guidelines for OS X: Advanced Optimization Techniques
In OS X v10.8, the default value of the
NSFontDefaultScreenFontSubstitutionEnabledsetting isNO. This setting determines whether or not text APIs (such asNSLayoutManager,NSCell, and theNSStringDrawingcategories onNSStringandNSAttributedString) substitute screen fonts when calculating layout and display of text.Although screen font substitution will no longer be the default, using screen font might still be appropriate to support:
- Compatibility with documents created with previous versions of your app. The difference in glyph advancement measurements between integral and floating-point values can cause a change in text layout.
- Fixed-pitch plain text style output—for example, the Plain Text mode in Text Edit. To keep the OS X v10.7 screen font substitution behavior as the default, set the
NSUserDefaultskeyNSFontDefaultScreenFontSubstitutionEnabledto YES.To maintain the screen font setting on a per-document basis, specify
NSUsesScreenFontsDocumentAttributeas a document attribute when you initialize an attributed string object.
defaults write -g NSFontDefaultScreenFontSubstitutionEnabled -bool true didn't seem to have (almost) any effect in most applications. But for some reason it disabled kerning in AppleScript Editor.
Best Answer
This usually happens when you have Fonts Caches (or actual Fonts) that are corrupt. I would do the following, to not only clear the caches, but also to verify your Fonts.
Clearing the font cache - you have a few options (Onyx is just easier).
atsutilutility. You basically would doastutil databases -removeUserthensudo astutil databases -remove, thenastutil server -shutdown, thenastutil server -ping. I would recommend restarting after this./Library/Cachesfolder, but I am not sure how well this works. There also used to be some older ways to clear the cache but I cant find them (and I am pretty sure it was tools before Mac OS 10.5).Verifying Fonts
/Applications/)Validate Fonts.Usually clearing the Font Cache works. I used to see a similar problem all the time with Microsoft Office 2004, and it had its own cache that we even cleared weekly. I haven't seen the Mac OS mess its cache up that often, but when it does, usually a quick fix. I have even seen a reboot sometimes clear it up (in very minor cases).