Preview engine doesn't link to fonts. (MacOS)

[MikeMaloney]

I expect that my issue will have something to do with my specific setup because searching for a similar issue both here and across the web didn't return anything similar.

The symptom is that all text is rendered by a ? in a box symbol in the preview pane. This is using the default untitled.epub project that appears when starting Sigil (2.7.6).

When I inspect a text element, I see that the rendered font family is .LastResort

Deleting the font cache using the command "atsutil databases -removeUser" didn't resolve the problem.

On thing that confuses me is that the code pane renders properly and I can change the font in the code pane via the prefences. I haven't found a place in the preferences where I can verify the font path used by the preview engine.

Any help is appreciated.

[KevinH]

My guess is you have updated your MacOS version recently. Unfortunately, that update includes fonts that have the same name as your old local font files you installed sometime (years?) earlier.

This font duplication breaks things as one font uses full unicode mappings and the older local version does not. The solution is to open FontBook and since you can not disable Mac OS installed fonts, you must disable the versions of your locally installed fonts.

See this issue:

https://github.com/Sigil-Ebook/Sigil/issues/831


Ps. This exact same thing happened to my Mac and it took forever to track down the reason, but disabling my local font files using Apple's FontBook app is easy.

[MikeMaloney]

That fixed it.

Thank you.

[KevinH]

Originally Posted by MikeMaloney

That fixed it.

Thank you.

Glad to hear it!

It is a frustrating bug as fresh installs of MacOS do not show a problem. It is hard to convince Qt to look at an issue that only happens when older (now broken?) fonts were added possibly years ago and an OS update is done instead of a fresh install. I finally just gave up. Hopefully it is a once and done thing. The issue has never cropped up again for me fwiw.