Safari Font Problems
Rich Menga had a Safari font problem in Windows:
I know you’re a busy guy, but if you or someone you know could find the answer as to why this is occurring, it’d be greatly appreciated. I have read on other blogs that people have been able to use this without any problems. I’m hoping you or someone else could find out why the blank-out’s happen.
I wasn’t sure, quite honestly. He wrote back today:
Safari issue fixed. If you have a lot of fonts installed, Safari won’t index all your fonts, and you’re left with no font rendering at all. Manually modify C:\Documents and Settings \ [username] \ Local Settings \ Application Data \ Apple Computer \ Safari \ Fonts.plist.
Just edit out enough of the fonts that you never expect Web pages to call upon directly.
His discovery lead me to a solution to the font problem that *I* was having with Safari. Even though I already had a version of Lucida Grande (and Lucida Grande Bold) installed on my machine, Safari insisted on using its own versions. With Safari 3.0, I could simply remove the TTFs from the Safari.resources folder – but Safari 3.0.1 is intelligent enough to restore deleted files and folders automatically (and yes, I’m impressed with that feature – even though it didn’t help my situation).
My font conflict caused all Lucida Grande characters in Safari (window UI and Web pages) to appear like garbage. I looked at the .plist file, per your suggestion – but that didn’t fix anything for me. Even though my Fonts folder in the Windows shell showed but two instances of Lucida Grande (one being the Bold derivation), I had to open up a command shell, browse to the C:\ Windows \ Fonts folder, get a directory of all the “Lucida Grande” files, then delete the duplicates. Indeed, each file had been duped 3x over.
With just one Lucida Grande / Lucida Grande Bold installed (Apple’s version), Safari looked as it should have in the first place. I blame Windows font management for this shortcoming, not Apple. Like anybody would have known to open up CMD.EXE and delete files that the Windows folder didn’t display!?
5 Comments
The Chris Pirillo Show
November 30th, 1999
at 12:00am
[IMG] Chris Pirillo Safari Font Problems Newspaper Industry Problems? Videos from a Cancer Patient Video Shopping and Starbucks Crashing Tweak Your ClearType Font Settings Last Minute Father?s Day Gift Ideas Amazon Associates Announces Grocery Promotion
WinExtra | wandering the wilderness of technology and the Internet
November 30th, 1999
at 12:00am
immediately for us poor deprived Windows users. Being the glutton I am for playing with software I headed out and got my own copy which I wrote about here. Almost immediately out came the reports about security holes and much written about the the text rending within Safari. Along with that smarter folks than me have weighed in on the reasoning of Apple releasing a windows version of Safari and while it can make for an interesting afternoon of reading and speculation I am more interested in how the
SocioBiblog
June 16th, 2007
at 10:23am
Safari Font Problems(Chris Pirillo)
Podcast 06-18-2007 : Chris Pirillo and bluefox » PCMechTV.com
June 18th, 2007
at 7:21am
[...] In the wee hours of last night I got to participate in a Skype audio conference on Chris Pirillo’s live videocast. Bluefox was sub’ing in as host and it was cool. Also want to thank Chris for mentioning the Apple Safari 3.0.1 Beta for Windows font issue where he mentioned me by name. This seems to now be a well-known issue with Safari for Windows - and Chris helped out informing the masses out there of a temporary fix before the next version of Safari is released. [...]
brandaggio
June 21st, 2007
at 12:08pm
I just ran into the same trouble after pimping out a new to me Windows laptop with some more fonts.
I tinkered and researched for a bit and came up with this working solution.