Text has turned to boxes in Ubuntu 16.04

Question

Without any cause that I can tell, all text has turned into boxes /rectangles everywhere in Ubuntu 16.04.

I am able to press ctrl-alt-F1 and go to shell, I have run :

apt-get update

And

apt-get upgrade

But this has not changed anything.

Any suggestions?

Solution

This can be the result of some invalid permissions settings on Font files. You need to set correct permissions for fonts.

To fix the permissions of all fonts ending with .ttf or .otf extension use these two commands.

find /usr/share/fonts -iname '*.ttf' -type f -exec sudo chmod -v 644 {} \;
find /usr/share/fonts -iname '*.otf' -type f -exec sudo chmod -v 644 {} \;

Then use this command to re-build font cache

sudo fc-cache -r -v

This should fix the problem.

Comments

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson]

Try fc-cache -fr (and reboot).

[Kevin Selva Prasanna]

This happens for me too. I just log out and log in back to fix it.

[zwets]

Have you tried (re)setting the system language & region settings? They are in System Settings / Language Support. After setting them, click "Apply System Wide" (assuming all users on your computer share locale preferences). Note: changes take effect after reboot.

[Ubuntovative is here]

+1, work like a charm !!!

[thoredge]

The two chmod lines can be shortened to one: find /usr/share/fonts -iname '*.[ot]tf' -type f -exec sudo chmod -v 644 {} \;