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I use Safari for the web on my G4 lap top. I'm running Panther.
All of a sudden the body text of the web pages has changed to something that looks arabic, but isn't. The language is English. When I copy and paste it into another document it's English. It's just that the font is strange in Safari. When I checked in the Safari preferences it's marked as "courier" and really should be ok.

Any ideas of how to fix it and/or why it happened?

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Dani AI

Generated

A few diagnostic pointers and practical steps to prevent this kind of glyph/appearance mismatch in Safari.

An odd-looking alphabet while copied text remains readable usually comes from font substitution or a bad font, though character-encoding problems can behave similarly (as noted). To isolate the cause, first view the page source and look for the page's font-family or CSS rules. Test the same page in a different browser; if it looks normal there the problem is local to Safari or the system fonts.

Use Font Book (shipped with OS X) or a font manager to validate and disable suspect fonts before removing anything permanently. Try temporarily setting Safari's default font to a common system font (Helvetica or Times) to see whether rendering changes. Quit Safari and restart the Mac after disabling or removing fonts so the system rebuilds its font cache; a restart is the safest way to force cache refresh on Panther-era systems.

Best practices: keep large font libraries out of system-wide folders, store project fonts in project directories, and use a font manager to activate only what you need. Validate any downloaded fonts before installing and avoid duplicate copies in multiple font folders. If system UI or core fonts are damaged and problems persist, reinstall the system fonts from your OS X install media or restore from a known-good backup.

Thanks to for updating the thread and to for the encoding suggestion; the above steps provide a way to diagnose, fix, and avoid similar font-rendering surprises in the future.

Member Avatar for OSX79newbie

Check the encoding:

Member Avatar for angela

It's fixed!
I went to the Apple store and had their "genius" help me.

It turns out that OSX and fonts are very touchy. There was a font in my "fonts" folder in the library (not the "fonts collections") that conflicted with the safari font.

I am a graphic designer and use a ton of fonts. Now I know, the "font" folder in Library is NOT where I put MY fonts. I need to keep them in my projects folder. :mrgreen:

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