MacOS 26 Apple Mail bug: Mail content in Arial Black :(

[yippieyeah]

Hello everyone,
the Tahoe update went surprisingly smoothly—the schwupp-dicity is impressive, and the essential apps and functions continue to run without any problems. The design has some good and some not-so-good aspects (border radius), but I don't want to complain.

However, there is one bug (?) that is very annoying, and I wanted to ask if anyone has any smart ideas about it:

Apple Mail formats a considerable number of my emails partially or completely in “Arial Black” – and only the “unformatted” part of the email content... (Text that has been formatted by the sender with a different font or bold/italic/underlined is displayed correctly for me).

Changes in the mail settings under “Font and Color” have no effect (on incoming emails).
Since I deleted “~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail,” no new “Arial Black” emails have arrived (but that could be a coincidence), but unfortunately the old misformatted emails remain as they were.
Deleting the system font caches (+ restart) didn't help either.
The font used (Arial Black) is located in the “System / Library / Fonts / Supplemental” folder and cannot be deleted / renamed (for testing purposes) – not even as root (...and I don't want to go any further at the moment).

I'm grateful for every contribution that helps further.

 

[daveedjackson]

I'm gonna bump this, I have been having the same exact issue. It resolved itself somehow but has just done it again. Not on all emails. Very strange.

 

[JCR0]

Same. Also I had Helvetica Regular (apparently the default is Helvetica Regular 12) selected as my Message Font, and it looks like it is defaulting to Helvetica Compressed (the font immediately below that in the font selector) instead. If I select Compressed, the appearance of the font does not change. That font looks a lot like Arial Black.

So it sounds like an off=-by-one error. Selecting another font from the list (Helvetica Light is relatively non-offensive) does work fine, so it isn't a full off-by-one error, maybe it is a zero-index error.

 

[yippieyeah]

I'm sorry that i didn't update this some days after my post here, so i'll get that right away:

Okay, this is really crazy:
Disabling all user fonts did not solve the problem, but deleting (or moving to another folder) all fonts in the user folder/Library/Fonts fixes the problem... When I move them back, the problem naturally returns.
So I moved all user fonts out again, then did another safe boot (to clear the font caches, not sure what effect that had this time compared to the first time) – and now everything looks fine. :dance:
Hopefully it stays that way.

 

[JCR0]

Same. Also I had Helvetica Regular (apparently the default is Helvetica Regular 12) selected as my Message Font, and it looks like it is defaulting to Helvetica Compressed (the font immediately below that in the font selector) instead. If I select Compressed, the appearance of the font does not change. That font looks a lot like Arial Black.

So it sounds like an off=-by-one error. Selecting another font from the list (Helvetica Light is relatively non-offensive) does work fine, so it isn't a full off-by-one error, maybe it is a zero-index error.

Adding some new info: Even when composing a new message with the default font set to Helvetica Regular, the message text displays in Helvetica Compressed. If I attempt to select Regular (the first option) from the font bar at the top of the Message compose window, the menu immediately jumps one down and selects Compressed instead! (and of course, the message font changes to Helvetica Compressed.

So this is not some sort of system font corruption issue, but rather a problem with the font selectors in Mail.app.

 

[JCR0]

I'm sorry that i didn't update this some days after my post here, so i'll get that right away:

Okay, this is really crazy:
Disabling all user fonts did not solve the problem, but deleting (or moving to another folder) all fonts in the user folder/Library/Fonts fixes the problem... When I move them back, the problem naturally returns.
So I moved all user fonts out again, then did another safe boot (to clear the font caches, not sure what effect that had this time compared to the first time) – and now everything looks fine. :dance:
Hopefully it stays that way.

So I only had two obscure fonts in ~/Library/Fonts, however your fix made me look in /Library/Fonts and see some ancient (circa 1995!) PostScript Helvetica fonts that included the troublesome Helvetica Compressed (filename HelveCom). I figured those could be interfering with the TrueType System version of Helvetica. I did a safe boot and moved those PostScript font files into /Library/Fonts Disabled (not sure if that is a stock folder or something created by a font management utility quite a few years ago).

Upon rebooting, all my Message Compose font issues and the previously-received messages with the compressed font returned to normal!

Thanks for the effort coming back to post your solution, it really helped me track this down!

 

[PhilipReely]

So I only had two obscure fonts in ~/Library/Fonts, however your fix made me look in /Library/Fonts and see some ancient (circa 1995!) PostScript Helvetica fonts that included the troublesome Helvetica Compressed (filename HelveCom). I figured those could be interfering with the TrueType System version of Helvetica. I did a safe boot and moved those PostScript font files into /Library/Fonts Disabled (not sure if that is a stock folder or something created by a font management utility quite a few years ago).

Upon rebooting, all my Message Compose font issues and the previously-received messages with the compressed font returned to normal!

Thanks for the effort coming back to post your solution, it really helped me track this down!

Thanks for the solution OP. I suffered from the same problem of helvetica compressed becoming the default mail font. I removed several type 1 & postscript fonts from ~/Library/Fonts to fix the problem. None of the ones removed were Helvetica or anything close. It seems to me that *any* old fonts cause the issue.

 

[PhilipReely]

Thanks for the solution OP. I suffered from the same problem of helvetica compressed becoming the default mail font. I removed several type 1 & postscript fonts from ~/Library/Fonts to fix the problem. None of the ones removed were Helvetica or anything close. It seems to me that *any* old fonts cause the issue.

Spoke too soon. Problem re-occurred on Mac going to sleep. No Helvetica roman in ~/Library/Fonts now so replaced with otf version from back up. Mail fonts now behaving.

 

[JCR0]

Spoke too soon. Problem re-occurred on Mac going to sleep. No Helvetica roman in ~/Library/Fonts now so replaced with otf version from back up. Mail fonts now behaving.

My troublesome old fonts were in /Library/Fonts (not ~/Library/Fonts) so also check there if you continue to have issues.