Task Tracker Wiki

Problem encountered in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS using GNOME.

The “Select File” dialogue window in Discord is unable to display any fonts. Wherever there would be text characters, there is blank rectangles.

• The problem persists through Discord restart, and system reboot.
• This is the only location where I've discovered this issue. Accessing similar file select dialogue windows in other applications does not produce this error.

Taken from Ioaniatr's solution to their own similar problem, posted to AskUbuntu. Their issue was with calculator and the chromium browser, both of which worked fine for me. However, since Discord is built on Chromium, I decided to give it a try, and it worked! Here was my process:

1. Close Discord. Not sure how important this step was, but I figured it was best practice not to tinker with these files at the same time I had an application using them.
2. Navigate to /home/[user]/.cache/, create a backup copy of the fontconfig folder.
3. In the terminal, type rm -rf ~/.cache/fontconfig to remove the non-backup fontconfig folder.
4. In the terminal, type sudo fc-cache -r -v to update the system's cache, now that the old fontconfig file was removed.
5. In the terminal, type find ~/snap/chromium/ -name 'fontconfig, which produced three results for me:

   /home/beloch/snap/chromium/1523/.config/fontconfig
   /home/beloch/snap/chromium/1536/.config/fontconfig
   /home/beloch/snap/chromium/common/.cache/fontconfig

6. In the terminal, type rm -rf ~/snap/chromium/common/.cache/fontconfig/ to remove that folder.
7. Once everything I wanted to remove was gone, I opened Chromium, which automatically recreated the deleted files. After that, the Discord file select dialogue box displays fonts correctly!

This problem reoccurred for me today. Rather than go through the entire process described above, I skipped straight to sudo fc-cache -r -v. I didn't even close discord, but this appears to have worked.

That said, the fact that it reoccurred makes me feel that the problem is not actually solved.