Tuesday, November 06, 2007

My fonts in Leopard are crazy. How do I reset the font cache?

In the best of all possible worlds, you should never have to reset the font cache, but Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) seems to have some stability issues with fonts, which sometimes appear missing, even though you can see them in Font Book. If you have serious font problems, you can try the following. It is (probably) risk free if you follow the instructions exactly, but if you do not follow them to the letter, you may damage something in your system.

Therefore you should only follow these instructions in two cases:
  • You understand them perfectly, and you know what they are doing.
  • You are desperate because of some font problems.
Here are the steps:
1. Open Terminal.
2. Type the following two commands:
cd `getconf DARWIN_USER_CACHE_DIR`
open ..
3. In the Finder window that appears, drag the folders -Caches-, -Tmp- and TemporaryItems to the Trash, if they exist.
4. Restart. You may get a message that the boot cache is being rebuilt.

Once you have restarted, your font problem may be gone.

For other font problems, see missing fonts and Helvetica Narrow.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

#Remove User database and restart ATS
atsutil databases -removeUser
atsutil server -shutdown

other commands can be found:
man atsutil

Magnus Lewan said...

I was not aware of the atsutil command, so that was welcome. However, when I google around, I fail to find posts where people admit that it actually solved any problem.

The man pages hint that the atsutil commands do the same thing as the method described above with getconf DARWIN_USER_CACHE_DIR, but I'm not sure I trust atsutil yet.

If anyone tries it and it works, feel free to post a comment.

Anonymous said...

This worked perfectly on my macbook. My fontbook had crashed and didnt open, and my mac generally ran slower and crashed a lot. After deleting the cache everything works properly!

thanks

Eric said...

atsutil worked for me.

Anonymous said...

ATS util worked perfectly for my macbook pro, too.

Anonymous said...

Note that atsutil server -shutdown is not recommended in Snow Leopard, although it was OK in Leopard. See the man page.

Sai Doe said...

WOW! I'had a erious problem with that font. This really works!!! THanks thanks

Anonymous said...

I had the same crash problem, and what I did is just disable the user fonts, and that´s it. No other special command required.