[Andrew O]

I'm having some weird problems with Flash displaying correctly in Snow Leopard. I can't remember if I saw this immediately on upgrading (several weeks ago) or not. The problem's actually well-described by the first poster in this Apple Support Forum thread. Specifically: certain *text* doesn't display. For instance, in this YouTube screenshot, you can see that the video and controls are working fine, but the text annotations just aren't there. I've also noticed that Google Maps Street View doesn't work. The initial view renders, but the controls don't respond.

Strangely, this is an issue only with one user account on the machine. A new user account doesn't have any of these problems. I've reinstalled Flash, trashed prefs and plists, rebooted, nothing works. There are no system extensions or prefpanes installed for the problem user that aren't installed for the test user. The problem affects Flash in all my browsers (and WebKit clients like NetNewsWire), so it doesn't seem to be a Safari plugin (like CosmoPod) or a Firefox plugin (like Firebug).

I'm stumped. Anyone have any ideas where I could look?

[moonmonkey]

try updating to the latest OS version with software update, Apple replaced Flash in one of them.

[Andrew O]

Actually, that wasn't it. It turned out that I had two copies of Arial (the font) on my computer: one in /User/Library/Fonts and one in HD/Library/Fonts. I suspect that Snow Leopard installed a newer version. Anyway, there was a conflict. REmoving the /User/Library/Fonts version solved it. Very weird.

[bfairbanks]

Hi there, thanks for this info. It solved my problem too.

When I removed the Arial font I noticed that there were other duplicates. Would it be a good idea to remove ALL of the duplicates to prevent future problems?

[heyotwell]

Well, I noticed some other duplicate fonts too, Times New Roman I think. I did clean those up as well though they weren't part of this problem I was having.

There's no danger in deleting duplicate fonts. Remember that FontBook can often resolve this problem for you: right-click on a font and chose "Resolve Duplicates." (I had done that to try to solve this problem and it didn't work--these weren't actually duplicate versions of Arial; one was in fact a newer version).

If you do it manually, it's always best to just move the font out of the Fonts folder to your Desktop while you make sure it's safe. Remember that many applications will need to be quit and relaunched to pick up changes you make to fonts (especially most graphics applications like Photoshop) so make sure not to throw away that font until you're really sure you don't need it!

[EndlessMac]

Originally Posted by bfairbanks 

When I removed the Arial font I noticed that there were other duplicates. Would it be a good idea to remove ALL of the duplicates to prevent future problems?

As heyotwell said you can turn off duplicates with the Font Book application that comes with Mac OS. This just turns off the duplicate fonts though rather than deleting them.

Having a lot of duplicate fonts slows down your computer needlessly. If you are one of those people who have lots of fonts on your computer then you might actually see a speed up with some applications. You should also do the Validate Font feature to make sure your all your fonts are usable. Corrupted fonts might cause other problems in the future.

[FireWire]

Originally Posted by EndlessMac 

As heyotwell said you can turn off duplicates with the Font Book application that comes with Mac OS. This just turns off the duplicate fonts though rather than deleting them.

I did that and discovered I had a few duplicate fonts, however, Font Book disabled the copy in the global Library instead of the copy in my user folder. Shouldn't it leave the "master" copy in place and disable the user's, since there's a good change the user messed with something?

[EndlessMac]

Originally Posted by FireWire 

I did that and discovered I had a few duplicate fonts, however, Font Book disabled the copy in the global Library instead of the copy in my user folder. Shouldn't it leave the "master" copy in place and disable the user's, since there's a good change the user messed with something?

I don't think there really is a "master copy". Your Mac doesn't copy over fonts for each account user's font folder when they are in use. It uses a combination of both so if you have duplicates then they are just that duplicates. You or most likely some application installed a duplicate font so they could be two different copies.

You install specific fonts for each user account so that you don't have to load all of them up in the global account. This way each person who users your computer can have their own set of fonts because people who use their computer lightly won't really need all those fancy fonts slowing down their computer experience. I think Font Book only disables them for that specific account only and I don't know if they are still disabled if you use another user account. The choice to disable it on the global Library might just be an arbitrary choice by Apple. I don't really have an exact answer for you.