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Safari 12.0 macOS Mojave version 10.14 MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2017, Four Thunderbolt 3 Ports)

AS of today (2/11/2018) characters in Safari are being shown as boxed question marks.

The same websites are displayed perfectly in Firefox.

Emojis are not displayed in Messages main window but in the sidebar they are!

I have tried restore default fonts etc but no difference.

Any help appreciated.fonts

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2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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My experience is to check the font in ‘font book’ one by one on preview display mode ⌘+1.
Just use up arrow and down arrow to quick check fonts.
If you find some font like the picture below ,delete it then reinstall may help. enter image description here

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  • I went into Font Book and in the "All Fonts' there were none listed. I manged to install the fonts and go through as above but they are all functioning. Opened up Safari bu problem still exists. I shut down Font Book reopened it and it has no fonts listed at all again.
    – Leeser
    Nov 2, 2018 at 17:24
  • @Leeser try `sudo atsutil databases –remove' then reboot
    – maP1E bluE
    Nov 2, 2018 at 17:32
  • Bingo! All back to normal!
    – Leeser
    Nov 2, 2018 at 19:12
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This happens when:

  • fonts needed are missing
  • fonts needed are corrupt (you can check those one by one in FontBook)
  • system that handles fonts (database) is corrupt

You seem to have tried to re-enable fonts, so since the next steps are more intrusive, I would make a good backup that you would trust if you have to erase the computer completely before proceeding.

  1. Install all updates (all of them - even ones you don't think you need for this - security / OS / app) and restart.
  2. Double check your backup
  3. Restart in safe mode to be sure it's not a simple corruption or software conflict.
  4. Uninstall any font management software and then restart in safe mode a second time to rebuild the font database.
  5. Test in a newly created user on the Mac (to be sure it's not just your user folder and preferences)
  6. Reinstall the OS from Recovery
  7. Erase and Install from Recovery
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