Font display breaking

Support & Help Requests
#1

I recently upgraded from 14.04 to 14.10 and then to 15.04. Everything has been working perfectly. Til today :smile:

The fonts seem to be only displaying bits of each letter. It doesn’t happen in all applications though. It shows up on the lock screen, restart screen, desktop icon text, main menus. Applications affected include Backup, Calculator, Disks, and more. Applications not affected include Chrome, Firefox, VLC. Sublime Text menus are affected, but not text in the editor.

I would upload a screenshot but I’m a new user.

Any advice towards solving this would be great.

#2

Hi,

have you done a full system update with your software sources download location set to “Main”?:

#3

I ended up reinstalling from the 15.04 ISO and everything is working great. It was a test installation so I didn’t lose anything important.

The fonts only seemed to get corrupted after the computer locked for a while. I don’t have enough linux experience to figure out what was different between my install an the clean install.

1 Like
#4

Hi All

It seems after almost 2 months trouble free my font display problem is back. In the image below you can see that some of the fonts appear corrupted and some don't display. If you look at the 2 spreadsheets side by side, you can see that the same text in the same font behaves differently in the 2 different files. Some programs seem unaffected, and others heavily affected. Chrome and Firefox have no issues at all.

Everything appears fine after a reboot, and the problem only starts after the 1st time the desktop has to be unlocked.

Any help with diagnosing the problem would be great. Last time I just reinstalled and it went away, but I am not excited about doing that every 2 months. Reboots are also a pain.

Thanks in advance.

Screenshot.png1366×768 140 KB

Fonts degrading after desktop lock
#5

The following command might help?:

sudo apt-get install -f

If anything is missing, it should possibly fix the problem?. :smiley: