Google Chrome repeatedly displays monospaced fonts wrong as “Times New Roman”

I observe an extremely annoying font problem in Google Chrome for Mac. When I visit a page like GitHub or Bitbucket (which use monospaced fonts, e.g. for code) I see the HTML sections that are meant to be displayed in a monospaced font displayed in “Times New Roman”. This pretty much makes these sites useless for me.

I found a blog post that describes a similar problem and which suggests to clear Mac OS X’s font caches with these terminal commands:

$ sudo atsutil databases -remove
$ atsutil server -shutdown
$ atsutil server -ping

This eliminates the problem but it only lasts until I restart the computer. I would have to issue these commands every time before I start Google Chrome after a computer restart to have monospaced fonts on these sites display correctly.

For clarification here are two screenshots that display the problem.

This is how it looks before I remove the font caches:

This is how it looks after the font caches have been cleared and how it should look:

Does anyone know of this problem and can provide a solution?

Solution 1:

I have been using Linotypes Font Explorer for quite some time now. There is a free version which is great. I have found less font issues on my Macs since using this app than with Suitcase, Fontbook or Fontcase, particularly with web sites. Once installed you can run a font cleaner which examines all your volumes on your Mac and eliminate sang potential problems

Solution 2:

Hmmm... I loaded this page as a test – I'm using version 23 of Chrome – and the text is being formatted correctly. Not in Courier, mind you, but in Menlo (which is effectively a revamped version of Monaco).

You may want to check Chrome's font settings – paste chrome://chrome/settings/fonts#font into the address bar – and see what it has decided to use as its fixed-width font. Curiously, in my case it seems to think that it should be using Courier, but (as I mentioned earlier) it actually uses Menlo instead.