Recently, on my Ubuntu 18.04 I have noticed that at least on gnome-calculator and chromium browser the fonts are displayed as squares. I have followed instructions here and here, the calculator is fixed, but the problem on chromium still exists when I open a dialog to search for a file.
Not sure if this happens on other applications as well, I haven't checked all my apps, but File managers nemo and nautilus are working fine.
Also, before few months ago, I have included some windows fonts for my libre office shown here. I used the copy (cp) method, not the link (ln -s). But, was working fine until yesterday. Haven't done any major change or update, at least on my Linux partition (dual boot). But, I don't think that this has anything to do with that.
Any idea how can I fix this issue?
42 Answers
I found the solution, was more simple than I thought.
First, you need to update local cache as described here:
rm -rf ~/.cache/fontconfig
sudo fc-cache -r -vThen, you need to find fontconfig folder inside snap, since this is the snap version of chromium.
find ~/snap/chromium/ -name 'fontconfig'Last, remove this folder inside .cache:
rm -rf ~/snap/chromium/common/.cache/fontconfig/Afterwards, chromium will recreate this folder automatically by using your local updated fontconfig inside ~/.cache/fontconfig.
Restart chromium browser to take this effect.
(The previous answer is the better but just a note for future readers)
Another way the problem described above happens is when ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini becomes corrupted. Make sure to delete any gtk-font-name and/or other incomplete lines from that file. Apparently, if GTK fails to parse it, you get the same problem as the screenshot shown above.