In various windows in Anki 2.1, text becomes garbled by the display of a few Unicode characters as question marks in squares. For example:
User dae on the Anki forums identified the characters as the First Strong Isolate (U+2068) and Pop Strong Isolate (U+2069) characters.
Checking the font
Peering into a running Anki process, the widgets are using the font family ".SF NS Text", the system font. The installed system font (/System/Library/Fonts/SFNSText.ttf) has version 14.0d1e3 (retrieved with FontForge), but unfortunately Apple's list of Mojave's fonts doesn't include the versions for system fonts. The "14" is suggestive of Mojave, though High Sierra includes some fonts with a major version of 14. The greatest font version in Sierra is 12. My installed system font is copyrighted 2015–2017, a period during which Mountain Lion, Mavericks, Yosemite, El Capitan, Sierra and High Sierra were active (though only the latter 4 were in support in 2017, and only the latter 2 were the latest version of macOS during 2017).
Other evidence
Anki is the only application I've noticed this in, but other Anki users have not experienced the issue. Moreover, if I create a new user on my computer and open Anki, it does not display the question-mark-in-a-box glyph.
I recall first seeing the problem in High Sierra, which was a clean install with user data imported from a Time Machine backup. The problem has persisted through updates & reinstalls.
Attempted solutions
- update/reinstalled Anki
- validated fonts in FontBook (which doesn't include the system font, but...)
- cleared caches with
sudo atsutil databases -remove - restored standard fonts with
sudo fontrestore default - reinstalled OS X 10.14.6
- removed Anki's preferences (from ~/Library/Preferences) and app data (~/Library/Application Support/Anki)
- renamed fontconfig caches to disable them (~/.cache/fontconfig, ~/.fontconfig, /opt/local/var/cache/fontconfig, /opt/local/var/cache/fontconfig-.cache)
- possibly others I've forgotten
The Question
What other steps can I take to resolve this issue?
System Info
- OS X 10.13.6–10.14.6
- Anki 2.1.40–2.1.44 (and probably earlier)
