Blank fonts in Illustrator Character panel

Question

After updating Illustrator on Windows 10 from 27.9 to 28.1, two of my critical project fonts have gone blank in the Character window after years of working fine. Illustrator's canvas shows them as empty text fields even though the fonts are still visible and functional in Photoshop, Premiere, After Effects and XD.

The fonts still work on my secondary office PC also running Windows 10 and were not affected by the app updates. I'm not running any 3rd party font management software on either system.

So far, I've:
- closed all Adobe apps and uninstalled/reinstalled the fonts via Control Panel and Registry Editor with reboots in between
- stopped/disabled Windows Font Cache Service and Windows Presentation Foundation Font Cache 3.0.0.0 and deleted the contents of: C:\Windows\ServiceProfiles\LocalService\AppData\Local\FontCache followed by rebooting
- Reset Preferences in Illustrator's Edit > Preferences > General settings
- uninstalled/reinstalled Illustrator followed by another font cache clear, reboot and font reinstallation.
- rolled back Illustrator to version 27.9 and then repeating the font cache clear/font reinstallation steps

I haven't tried a clean reinstall of the Adobe Suite yet or a new/clean Windows installation but I would like to avoid needing to start from scratch. Is there an Illustrator specific cache that can be cleared or a different installation method or order of operations I should try?

Thanks in advance for any advice!

Bobby Henderson · Answer

You probably already know Adobe Clean is an internal typeface system developed for Adobe's own uses. It's not available via the Adobe Fonts service. The Adobe Clean sans and serif type families are not bundled into applications like Adobe Illustrator. Creative Cloud subscribers can download and install the fonts from Adobe's Spectrum page (after agreeing to terms of service, which probably should be carefully read).

There are some odd things happening. The first issue is the sans serif type family is the only thing that downloads from the link on the Developer page. Even if you click on the Adobe Clean Serif link it takes you to the same location and link. Aside from that, in my Illustrator 28.1 installation the Regular and Bold styles of Adobe Clean do not work. The text string renders blank. Funny thing: the same fonts work alright in CorelDRAW. Go figure. This is via testing on a PC (still) running Win 10 Pro.

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