How to fix Garbled Characters in Apple Mail

Last night I installed Adobe Font Folio: I was trying to get inspired for a brochure I'm working on. After installing 300+ fonts and spending a good hour browsing through them I decided to check my email. I was definitely not amused when I got the following:

Frustrated, I assumed it was my fault as I'm pretty certain I prematurely closed the window while it was installing the fonts. Solution? Reinstall fonts. Result? No change.

My next inclination was to verify and repair disk permissions. It was definitely worth a shot. Again, no change.

Humble, as I am, I resorted to Mr. Google for some assistance. I didn't exactly know what to search for, but "fix garbled characters apple mail" seemed to work. I decided to check out the link from creativetechs.com entitled "Garbled Font Fix: Corrupt Font Cache." I learned that sometimes the OS X font cache file becomes corrupt and the only fix is to rebuild the cache. There are commercial programs and a tutorial on Adobe's web site explaining how to do so. Here is a screenshot representing font rendering from a faulty cache.

Since my font cache seemed fine, I continued to follow links. CreativeTechs had a tip on their site with some possible solutions:

1. ensure that multiple versions of the same font are not active (specifically Helvetica Fractions)
2. turn off auto-activation in Suitcase
3. check font cache files for corruption

I don't use Suitcase (a font management application) and the problems I'm having are not indicative of a corrupt font cache: by process of elimination I opened up FontExplorer to investigate the first solution.

Alright, so it seems Helvetica Fractions Bold and Helvetica LT Std Fractions maybe the culprits. I deactivated the fonts by deselecting them. I switched back to Apple Mail and voila! Problem fixed!

Because I didn't need to explore the font cache, I'm posting this link to Font Geek's wonderful article outlining how to identify and troubleshoot cache problems.

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