I can’t remember exactly when it happened, but after upgrading my workstation to Ubuntu 17.10 some sites didn’t render propperly. Specifically, some parts of sites with text in a specific font didn’t render at all. Text simply didn’t show. The fonts did show up in the GNOME Fonts application, however… Strange.

It could have been the upgrade, or the fact that I re-installed ttf-mscorefonts-installer. A lack of a specific source of the problem didn’t help in finding an answer. The thing I did notice was that even in the Inspector window the font wasn’t rendering. So it wasn’t page-related.

Anyway, after a lot of digging around, the solution is rather simple: sudo fc-cache -f -v

How did I get to this solution?

One of the solutions I had tried was fc-cache -f -v. Then, suddenly, I noticed that the global font cache didn’t get cleaned:

...
/var/cache/fontconfig: not cleaning unwritable cache directory
/home/alrik/.cache/fontconfig: cleaning cache directory
/home/alrik/.fontconfig: cleaning cache directory
fc-cache: succeeded

Then I remembered that I had some fonts installed system-wide…

sudo fc-cache -f -v saved the day… D’oh!

I hope this helps someone out. If this doesn’t solve your problem, maybe you can find a hint at: https://askubuntu.com/questions/55643/install-ms-truetype-fonts-system-wide-for-all-users

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