How-To Clear Your Mac's Font Cache
Posted 06/29/2010 at 12:55pm
| by Scott Rose
I just updated to Mac OS X 10.6.3 through Software Update, but now all of my fonts look really strange in Pages and Keynote. Even worse, most of my fonts are completely missing from Word and Excel! This was all working just fine in 10.6.2. Is there any way that I can downgrade back to 10.6.2?

Before clearing your font caches, your fonts will look something like this.
You could downgrade back to 10.6.2 (by reinstalling 10.6 from your original Mac OS X Installation DVD and then reapplying the Mac OS X 10.6.2 updater available on Apple’s website), but the solution to your problem is much simpler than that. All you need to do is clear your Mac’s font caches, then restart your Mac, and everything will be back to normal again. You can clear your font caches by using any number of Mac utilities such as Cocktail ($15, maintain.se) or OnyX (donations accepted, www.titanium.free.fr).

After clearing your font caches, your fonts will be back to normal again!
If you’re running Leopard or Snow Leopard, you can clear the font caches with a Terminal command. Open the Terminal and type atsutil databases -removeUser and press Return. That clears the font caches for the current user. To clear them for all users, type sudo atsutil databases -remove and press Return. You’ll be prompted for an administrator password.