International Bug in iTunes and Mac OS X

[alexob]

Howdy there, new to the forum.

I'm a MacBook pro owner running on Mac OS X Leopard. Someday, I tried to install japanese character set to be recognized by the system since I go every once in a while on japanese websites. However something wrong happened on my system, because iTunes has integrated some characters of asian origin or has fragmented the letters of the software. Here is a visual of what it looks like now.



It doesn't remove any fuctionality of the software, but as you can see, it's unreadable and impossible to change. In another instance, some of the character to seize in Adobe After Effects CS3 or the project size are displaying the same kind of bugged character. So I'm guessing that it's Mac OS that is the culprit.

I already tried to repair the permission, to completely remove iTunes and reinstall it. install a newer version. remove any asian language suport from the international setting and so far nothing have changed in those software. I think the problem is that the font used for both of those software is corrupted.

Anybody have some input on this?
Thanks in advance

[minckster]

Those are Hebrew characters (oddly with the vowels, which are most of the dots above, below, and within the letters, and which usually aren't indicated in Hebrew).

[Giaguara]

Hi Alex,

I see no bug there. You installed a bad font, that's it.

Disable or remove the bad font, and problem solved. If in doubt, disable all added potential bad ones.

http://www.apple.com/pro/tips/badfonts.html
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.h...en/fb1741.html
http://images.apple.com/pro/pdf/L311277A_FontTT_v4.pdf

You could also clean font caches with OnyX.

[alexob]

Thanks for the prompt answer folks It's good to see a place which know their Macs but UNfortunately it gets weird from here.

Hebrew uh? That's weird, since I haven't installed any language profile under this one... anyway it can't be helped ;P

So, I looked around the forum and most suggested to see if the bugs is on the whole system(in other cases of mac os being a prick), So I logged into a new account to confirm if the problem is global or localized. I created a new admin account and the problem isn't reproduced on the dummy profile. Fair enough, it means my profile is messed up.

I went back in international options and removed anything weird. My computer is in french, All the other options under here are French langage's closest cousins so I didn't see any reason to remove em.




I did what Giaguara suggested to me by removing any font that might be part of the reasons why It's not showing properly... Mostly manualy going through each of them and checking if the font was showing properly. A couple were unreadable so I deleted most of them and deactivated any non-latin type fonts.



After that I tried to use OnyX (Which is an awesome app by the way thanks for letting me know of it's existence) cleaning most of my machine. And restarted, and... yeah, the problem is still there.

Maybe that can help track the problem. It's not always showing the wrong character. On the side menu, when I select an option, for example, I select podcast, then the selected option will have the correct characters.



Since cleaning everything up, I haven't reinstalled iTunes itself.
I'm not desperate, but this one is though and I have no bloddy idea on how to resolve that. Any further ideas? I wouldn't want to migratemy whole profle to a new one, but it seem to be the only working solution.

[Giaguara]

Did you run in OnyX Cleaning > Fonts with all options???

Actually, I just happened to remember a kind of related bug... on iPods you would only see 'unknown track' type of details if your track and artist names were in Hebrew.

If there are any fonts that you installed only on this user, then the guilty one would probably be one of those user specific fonts. Did you install them for user or for all?

[alexob]

Yes I did run OnyX cleanup utillities for the font with all options checked.
Generaly I do install for all, but it's possible it's specific for that user. Is it possible that the main font for iTunes and certain instances f Mac OS application would pick the wrong default font? (I think most application by apple are using Lucida Grande right?) Is there a way I could maybe reinstal all original fonts provided by the system? Or simply removing everything that is not a system font from the fontbook maybe?

[alexob]

Well I'll be damned
I found the problem, and yes it was a wrong instance of Lucida Grande
I don't know where that came from, but it seem that the default font for lucida grande had a few undesirable instances. I removed the extra in fontbook (Which were Lucida Bold and another one) And voilà. iTunes is readable again

Thanks a TON for the pointers. This has plagued me for month.
I'll come back and mess around if I have another problem. Or just t hang around.
Cheers

[Giaguara]

Cool. And just hang around, will be more fun
You have good Mac skills, those are always useful around.