Fonts in pdf documents screwed up when generated with latex (specifically, pdflatex) on mac osx

Question

My colleague suggests that texniscope is somehow to blame and that I should try purging it from my system. I really hope not to have to resort to that!

Possible clues:<

Answer 1

This bug has driven me nuts. Inspired by this hint, here is the best way I found to cope with it, namely executing the following sequence in a shell:

atsutil databases -removeUser
sudo atsutil databases -remove
atsutil server -shutdown
atsutil server -ping

You may add it this sequence in a shell function in your shell config file (mine is .zshrc):

function atsrm()
{
  atsutil databases -removeUser
  sudo atsutil databases -remove
  atsutil server -shutdown
  atsutil server -ping
}

...and simply call atsrm in a terminal to purge the font cache. Be aware that Skim will crash if it was open, and some application may display some characters improperly, so you will have to restart them.