11-05-2011, 07:07 PM

Befuddled... Why are there no fonts showing up under typeface in Mac Mail?
ie - If I click on the white A in my mail message the font window opens, but there are no fonts - nary a one - listed in the box.

Mail>Preferences>Fonts & Colours - shows Arial 14 and that's what I am stuck with - period. I do have a substantial list of fonts (necessary for my work) installed. Both open and true type, so I would have thought that some if not all would appear in the list? I'd like to be able to change this font from time to time. Any clues anyone please?

11-05-2011, 09:13 PM

Open mail, top menu, "File" - select "New Message". Click on the "A" in order to show the "format bar". On the format bar, click on the font box and select the down arrow. All your fonts should now show up.

Are you doing that?

11-06-2011, 07:09 AM

Yes - which is what I probably did not explain as well as I should in my original posting and which said -
"If I click on the white A in my mail message the font window opens, but there are no fonts "
There is simply no way to choose an alternate font. Either by opening the window via the Big White A or from Mail>Preferences>Fonts & Colours etc. I checked to see that the Apple Fonts were still installed on my computer and had not inadvertently been deleted while installing all the others that I have, but no - they are there! It is a huge puzzle. I am certainly not a Mac genius, but I am not really a novice either. I know my way around a Mac fairly well so I really am scratching my head. Font conflict? No reason that I can think of why that should be - right?
Thank you for trying to help.

11-06-2011, 02:35 PM

There's no reason why your fonts are missing if they're available in other applications and you can see them from the "Font Book.app". Having said that, the best I can suggest is to reinstall the Mac Mail program to see if that resolves it. Also, are you using a third party font manager program by chance? If you are, as a test turn it off or keep it from loading up on startup.

11-06-2011, 02:43 PM

No - not using a font manager (probably should be...) and yes all the fonts are visible in Font Book. I was not sure if I could reinstall Mac Mail on its own and which would be a brilliant idea as Mail has been giving me all sorts of problems for a long while now and which I have posted my issue with, in that I have to exit and reopen it several times a day in order to make sure that everything that was sent is indeed showing up. Since even with clicking "Get Mail" there is mail that just does not show and suddenly appears when I quit and reopen mail and some of which is a day old at least! Not good.
The file com.apple.mail.plist does not appear when I run a search for it in the finder either. I am going to try logging on as a different user and see if the problem appears across the board as well. TTFN

11-06-2011, 07:50 PM

Seems like you have a good handle on it. Let us know how it turns out.

11-06-2011, 08:12 PM

Will do - it might hopefully be of use to someone else.

04-12-2012, 09:37 AM

Five months later and still no luck. Situation remains the same. No fonts in the font list. They say there is a solution to pretty much everything so there has to be a solution to this? Checked my daughter's laptop - no problem all of her fonts (few that they be) are there.

I use a lot of fonts in my work and I wondered if Mail just took one look at the list and ran off screaming over the horizon? It seems a shame though as I so love using Mail but this is a bit of a sticky wicket.

Any new ideas anyone? Please??

PS - Tried to attach a screen capture of the empty font list window, but that decided it was not happening either...sigh

04-12-2012, 10:55 AM

Try a Safe Boot (holding shift key) - it does a font cache reset. (Just boot normally after Safe Boot completes)

04-12-2012, 11:50 AM

Thanks - I'll give it a try as soon as I can shut down Photoshop. (Will lose the history on my current files if I do)

05-20-2012, 04:58 PM

Still in the same boat. No fonts visible on list under Typeface. Most, most frustrating.