Snow Leopard Font Problem - Bitstream Vera Sans

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Tue, 17 Nov 2009 02:12:30 GMT  <== Computers ==> 

I recently had a problem with a web site when viewed in Safari 4.0.3 in Mac OS X 10.6.2. All the body text appeared as a sequence of capital "A" characters, surrounded by square boxes, as pictured below.

Bad Bitstream Vera Sans fonts

I discovered that it was due to "Bitstream Vera Sans" being mentioned as a font-family in the CSS file. I fixed it by downloading the font via the "Download" button at www.dafont.com/bitstream_vera_sans.font, decompressing the downloaded zip file, selecting the four ".ttf" files in the Finder, right-clicking and choosing "Open With.../Font Book.app", clicking "Install Font" on the resulting window. Then, in order to clear the font cache, I did the following in a Terminal window:

sudo atsutil databases -remove
sudo atsutil databases -removeUser
sudo atsutil server -shutdown
sudo atsutil server -ping

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