Font characters displayed as squares in Ubuntu 18.04

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?

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Solution 1:

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 -v

Then, 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.