InDesign Plugin showing up in weird font

[barb_5662]

I purchased a new iMac a few months ago and installed InDesign along with Illustrator and Photoshop.  When I added the Canto plug-in (Digital Asset Management), it now shows up displaying a weird unreadable font.  I've tried everything I can think of.  I uninstalled and reinstalled both InDesign and the Canto plugin several times.  My preferences in InDesign are set to the US Dictionary, Creative Cloud is set to download app in English (North America).  I deleted preferences.  This plug-in is completely unusable until I can figure it out.  BTW - my co-working is running the same app versions with the same Mac OS and does not have the same issue.  

[leo.r · Accepted solution]

You need to contact Canto support directly with this question.

[barb_5662]

I did and they are baffled.  

[leo.r]

I did and they are baffled.  

By @barb_5662

Try to create a new clean admin account in System Settings > Users & Groups and work from there - will it make a difference?

[Joel Cherney]

This is just a guess on my part, but is your macOS locale English? Is you coworker's locale also English? (It's a looooong shot, but your issue might be related to the macOS feature where you can tell the OS that a given app's locale doesn't match the system locale. )

[barb_5662]

My system and apps are set to English (North America) as is my co-workers.  We are usingt he same plug-in from Canto.

[Brad @ Roaring Mouse]

I've seen  similar issues when either a "standard" system font that an app uses for its UI has been inadvertantly disabled, or another font has been loaded that is conflicting with that font. Are you using a font manager? Check there for any font discrepancies (and maybe purge font caches). If you only use Font Book, maybe go to it and try File > Restore Standard Fonts.

[barb_5662]

I use Adobe font management (required with the latest versions).  I googled what Canto uses for their interface and it is "Inter".  I enabled that font, restarted my computer but not change.  

[Joel Cherney]

When I experienced the issue that Brad described, it was because I had the default Helvetica Neue TTC that came pre-installed in macOS, as well as TTFs that I had manually installed.  Removing the ones I had installed myself resolved the issue. I think that leo.r's suggestion to try with a fresh account should be a good way to see if some font you had installed yourself was causing the issue.

When I look at your screenshot, to be honest, I wonder if we aren't looking at Helve Neue 77 Bold Condensed. I don't think that installing Inter from Adobe Fonts would make the font available to the plug-in, though; wouldn't it need to be inside the app bundle? When you install it, does the plugin still show that condensed font that you showed us in your first screenshot?

[Brad @ Roaring Mouse]

Agreed. The plugin would need to have it supplied internally. In which case, loading it from elsewhere might be exacerbating the conflict.

It does seem this is a system begging for a font cache purge! @barb_5662 If you don't already have a way to clear font caches, suggest you download a version of Font Finagler (easy to find if you Google it). It has a great Font Cache purger.