I'm not a Mac expert, I've never even left a mobile phone in a pub, but my guess is that there's something suspect about the particular fonts that is causing OS X to on occasions reject them. Perhaps the recent font related security patches are finding something about the fonts that they don't like, perhaps at specific sizes - hence them working in some places and not others. What fonts are causing the issue?

This problem happens if you have the font installed locally on your machine through FontXplorer. Is that the case for you?

http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=29729

> I have also had the same issue in OpenOffice, TextEdit, PowerPoint

A different bug? Or same cause?

Yes that is correct I have FontExplorer and the font is loaded locally. Weird issue though, surely it should default to the local version if it is intalled, no?

> A different bug? Or same cause?

A little different. For example in OpenOffice the issue is with bullet points in documents created in Word on the PC and Mac.

Yes, is a Chrome bug. I recommend you use the "Smiley" syntax found on Paul Irish's blog here:

http://paulirish.com/2009/bulletproof-font-face-implementation-syntax/#s...

in OpenOffice the issue is with bullet points in documents created in Word

That's most likely because Word uses symbols from a separate source instead of bullet symbols from the font in which the text is set.

It is a known Chrome bug, it happens with other font managers (not only FontExplorer) AND it is unlikely to be fixed anytime soon.

One has three options:

A] stop using the font manager software.

B] Keep all fonts in the OSX designated font folders (which isn't a very good option in the case of font managers such as FontExplorer)

C] Forget about using Chrome.

Personally, I opted for option C (Safari is still the king of speed on the mac platform, and to my eyes, is the best WebKit browser for the platform anyway)

An alternative may be to rename (font name table not the file name) the @font-face linked font to a unique name. Probably okay for most open source fonts, eg "Gentium" -> "Gentium 1234"

The solution is to not use the local('font_name') declaration in @font-face. Use Paul Irish's smiley method and it works fine in Chrome.

A workaround:

Copy the text that's showing up as boxes with 'A' in them, paste it into textedit.
Select a word and Command-T to open the fonts panel and see what font it is.
Now go to whatever third-party font manager you have installed, and disable ALL variants of the font there.
Quit the font manager, and now open Fontbook.
You should see the font in there, grayed out. Enable it.
Restart Chrome, and that font will appear just fine.
You'll have to do this for each font, unfortunately. It's a pain, but Chrome's so much faster and better that I don't really mind...