Problem with fonts after clean installation of Confluence server

[Radosław Kojdecki]

I have problem with fonts during article edit. When I VIEW article it is OK :

But when I try to EDIT it looks like that :

I've checked it on two laptops with MacOs X (Sierra 10.12.4 and El Capitan 10.11.6) and on 3 different browsers (Firefox, Safari and Chrome) so I'm pretty sure that it is problem with server.

It is installed on CentOS 7 with PostgreSQL database. Server contains only JIRA and Confluence software (with Postgres).

[Andy Heinzer · Accepted solution]

It is unclear what exactly might be causing this behavior.  I recommend trying the following one at a time, checking to see if it resolves the issue after each step. These steps are in order of increasing environment impact (from "no impact" to "restart and re-index required"):

1. Clear your browser cache
2. Run   fc-cache -s    on the server to update the fonts cache
3. Clear the plugins cache (restart required)
4. Rebuild the content indexes from scratch (restart required)

[Andy Heinzer]

Sorry for the follow-up, but it looks like I might have left out some critical additional information here.  It seems that this problem can occur on servers running Confluence when the operating system is missing some specific font packages.

As a result, you would likely first need to install these fonts with commands such as:

yum install dejavu-fonts-common
yum install dejavu-sans-fonts
yum install dejavu-sans-mono-fonts

Only after these are installed, if the issue persists should the steps of clearing the cache have any effect on this problem.

[Roman Kirilenko]

I prefer Debian and never had this issue, but today I had to use CentOS distro...

You made my day. Thank you!

[Andy Heinzer]

For others that come across this thread, I'd recommend the KB in Confluence for Confluence UI shows garbled or corrupt text on CAPTCHA, macros and/or diagrams due to missing fonts

The same problem can happen for Jira too, see KB: JIRA UI shows unreadable text or nothing on CAPTCHA and some gadgets due to missing fonts

Both have the same underlying root cause of these specific font packages missing from the operating system.