A week or so after upgrading Firefox to 3.0.7 on my Linux system, I began running across an occasional web page that wouldn’t render correctly. At first I attributed it to poor page coding — perhaps one of those old-timers that still hasn’t learned that there’s more to web browsers than IE, or someone who mucked up their CSS and wound up with white text on a white background — but since I wasn’t necessarily in need of the information at the site, considering the Google search that took me to the site provided many more possible links, I just moved on to the next site without bothering to figure out why the page didn’t render.
Unfortunately, the frequency of pages not rendering properly began to increase to the point that I began experiencing the problem with web sites that I did need to access. Opera could render them fine, and Firefox on my Mac OS X system had no problem, but Firefox on Linux was a basket case. Even worse, Galeon and Seamonkey crashed when I tried to visit those same sites.
OK, let’s start Firefox from the command line and visit one of the problematic sites.
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(firefox-bin:25838): Pango-WARNING **: failed to create cairo scaled font, expect ugly output. the offending font is 'Helvetica 8.19921875' (firefox-bin:25838): Pango-WARNING **: font_font status is: out of memory (firefox-bin:25838): Pango-WARNING **: scaled_font status is: out of memory |
The Great Gazoogle wasn’t being too helpful, leading me to several sites where a similar problem had been reported, usually with an early beta build of Firefox 3, but no obvious solution. I eventually came across an Ubuntu bug report that lead to the apparent solution. I’m not running Ubuntu, so the dpkg-reconfigure and update-pangox-aliases commands were not helpful, but the fc-cache was.
So, I ran
sudo fc-cache -fs |
and waited for it to plow through all the installed fonts on the system. For good measure I did the same on my user-installed fonts too.
fc-cache -f |
Restart Firefox and visit a failing site, and … no errors, no rendering problems, everything seems to be back to normal.
Just for completeness, I visited the same site in Galeon and Seamonkey and, instead of crashing, they now render the sites correctly too.
I have no idea how the font cache got hosed — I haven’t installed any fonts recently — and I haven’t (knowingly) done anything that would have modified the font cache directories. Nevertheless, something got screwed up and a regeneration of the font cache fixed it.
