Tor Browser: Fonts of the GUI (Menu, Bookmarks, ...) do not render after Update

The following image say it all:

• the web pages are rendered normally
• every text of the Browser (menu, bookmarks, popup about, a.s.o) are broken

My system: Fedora release 33 (Thirty Three).

The version of the browser should appear on the picture.

The system has been updated and rebooted after the issue appeared (today).

moved from tpo/team#43 (moved)

moved from tor-browser#40703 (moved)

I encouraged the person to file this ticket because while it seems to be font related, it seems to be the inverse of #40382 (closed) -- it is the fonts in the chrome that don't render, not the fonts in the pages.

marked this issue as related to #40382 (closed)

Makes sense. We seem to have a mix of content and chrome font issues in #40382 (closed), so I'm going to go ahead and link these issues anyway. We'll see if the fix coming in 11.0.1. solves one or both.

We have an anonymous report that someone put in the signup form:

Re: tpo/team#43 (moved) removing blank section in tor-browser_en-US/Browser/TorBrowser/Data/fontconfig/fonts.conf fixes the issue

I have this line in the log:

Fontconfig warning: "/home/user/tb/tor-browser_en-US/Browser/TorBrowser/Data/fontconfig/fonts.conf", line 85: unknown element "blank"

If I remove the <blank> lines the warning disappear, but this does not solve the problem for me.

Removing the whole tag does not solve the problem for me.

Fedora 33, same problem. Tor Browser unusable after update to V11 due to fonts not rendering in GUI.

Editing <blank>...</blank> out of ~/.local/share/torbrowser/tbb/x86_64/tor-browser_en-US/Browser/TorBrowser/Data/fontconfig/fonts.conf does not help.

Fedora 34, not matter Gnome or XFCE

Can someone link Broken Encodings after update to this issue? It appears to be the same, while the other issue has received no attention.

I'm using Fedora 34, same issue. When using Windows 10, the issue doesn't appear.

after the update to 11.0.1 no improvement.

Does someone know

1. is it a code page or font issue? (an unnoticed change in code page in such a big software makes no sense to me, but who knows)
2. which font is missing?
3. where torbrowser is looking for it?

Same here. Sadly, this renders torbrowser totally unusable :(

Hi @qawse & @pparik, we're still investigating this issue and therefor a fix for it wasn't included in Tor Browser 11.0.1. Either this ticket or #40382 (closed) will be updated when a fix is ready.

mentioned in issue tpo/ux/design#30 (closed)

added Bug label

added Next label

This is happening on my Fedora 34 installation too. I "fixed" it by removing all of the .ttf typeface in the Browser/fonts directory and leaving NotoSansSC-Regular.otf. I have no idea which .ttf typeface is the culprit, but it seems to be one of the ttfs included in the bundle. Or perhaps it's just a coincidence.

It worked for me too, on Fedora 33. Thank you.

Icons in bookmarks are missing. But I can use the browser again.

This works! You have to remove all NotoSans*.ttf, the other files may stay.

It seems that there is no TTF for the Latin script – is it possible this is the culprit?

For anyone who's finding Tor Browser 11 unusuable due to this bug, you may want to consider temporarily downgrading to Tor Browser 10.5.10 until a fix is available. Thanks!

+ disable update -> close the browser -> start again!

Same problem on Fedora 33 with Tor Browser 11.0.1

I solved it by deleting ~/.local/share/torbrowser/tbb/x86_64/tor-browser_en-US/Browser/TorBrowser/Data/fontconfig/fonts.conf, everything seems fine.

I removed both NotoSansGurmukhi-Regular.ttf and NotoSansSinhala-Regular.ttf and everything seems to work fine.

location:

~/.local/share/torbrowser/tbb/x86_64/tor-browser_en-US/Browser/fonts/NotoSansGurmukhi-Regular.ttf
~/.local/share/torbrowser/tbb/x86_64/tor-browser_en-US/Browser/fonts/NotoSansSinhala-Regular.ttf

I downloaded the two Google fonts from Google's site to test. The problem came back. With a quick look, I couldn't find any reports of other applications with this font issue.

https://fonts.google.com/noto/specimen/Noto+Sans+Sinhala?selection.family=Rufina&query=Noto+Sans
https://fonts.google.com/noto/specimen/Noto+Sans+Gurmukhi?selection.family=Rufina&query=Noto+Sans+Gurmukhi

More specifically, I just removed both NotoSansGurmukhi-Regular.ttf and NotoSansSinhala-Regular.ttf and everything seems to work fine.

Thanks! Removing those two fonts is fixing the issue for me too.

Interesting! How did you manage to narrow it down to those two fonts @nocyber?

Fwiw @boklm, none of the languages we support at present for Tor Browser require these scripts.

Lol, gruntwork. I got curious about this comment. I tried taking the fonts out to find the culprit, but there was more than one so I took them all out and added as many as I could back in.

I seemed to experience the same issue no matter which of the two fonts were added back in.

mentioned in issue #40382 (closed)

Do not all of your solutions create a more unique fingerprint?

fonts.conf - on my system(Fedora 35) file's path is "~/.local/share/torbrowser/tbb/x86_64/tor-browser_en-US/Browser/TorBrowser/Data/fontconfig/fonts.conf"

First line: <?xml version="1.0"?>

Adding "1" to version number is fixing the issue: <?xml version="11.0"?>

I think the previous reply is correct.

There is no XML version "11.0". It is not syntactically valid, so I think the effect is the same as erasing the file.