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ioaniatr
Asked: 2020-04-05 11:50:13 +0800 CST

Font characters displayed as squares in Ubuntu 18.04

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Recently, on my Ubuntu 18.04 I have noticed that at least on gnome-calculator and chromium browser the fonts are displayed as squares. I have followed instructions here and here, the calculator is fixed, but the problem on chromium still exists when I open a dialog to search for a file.

Not sure if this happens on other applications as well, I haven't checked all my apps, but File managers nemo and nautilus are working fine.

Also, before few months ago, I have included some windows fonts for my libre office shown here. I used the copy (cp) method, not the link (ln -s). But, was working fine until yesterday. Haven't done any major change or update, at least on my Linux partition (dual boot). But, I don't think that this has anything to do with that.

Any idea how can I fix this issue?

browse dialog.

gnome fonts chromium filemanager 18.04

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    I found the solution, was more simple than I thought.

    First, you need to update local cache as described here:

    rm -rf ~/.cache/fontconfig 
sudo fc-cache -r -v

    Then, you need to find fontconfig folder inside snap, since this is the snap version of chromium.

    find ~/snap/chromium/ -name 'fontconfig'

    Last, remove this folder inside .cache:

    rm -rf ~/snap/chromium/common/.cache/fontconfig/

    Afterwards, chromium will recreate this folder automatically by using your local updated fontconfig inside ~/.cache/fontconfig.

    Restart chromium browser to take this effect.

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  2. (The previous answer is the better but just a note for future readers)

    Another way the problem described above happens is when ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini becomes corrupted. Make sure to delete any gtk-font-name and/or other incomplete lines from that file. Apparently, if GTK fails to parse it, you get the same problem as the screenshot shown above.

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