How to Clear the macOS CoreText Font Cache via Terminal

The CoreText Engine

Every single letter, number, and symbol you see on your Mac’s screen—whether it is a bold headline in Safari, code in Xcode, or the menu bar at the top of the screen—is rendered by the CoreText framework. Because parsing and rendering complex typography (especially customized fonts or massive language character sets) is mathematically intensive, macOS heavily caches the rendered glyphs.

If you install a corrupted third-party font, or if the CoreText cache simply becomes corrupted over time, the visual results are catastrophic. Text may suddenly appear as a series of chaotic boxes (the dreaded “tofu” effect), letters might overlap, or applications like Adobe Illustrator might crash instantly upon opening the font menu.

To resolve these typographical rendering issues, you must forcefully purge the CoreText font cache using the Terminal.

Using the ATSUTIL Command

Historically, clearing the font cache involved hunting down specific temporary folders hidden deep within the filesystem. Fortunately, Apple provides a dedicated command-line utility called atsutil (Apple Type Services Utility) specifically designed to manage the font server.

Because the font cache affects the entire system, you must run this command with elevated administrator privileges.

1. Save any open work and completely quit all applications (especially design software like Photoshop or Illustrator).
2. Open the Terminal application.
3. Execute the following command:

sudo atsutil databases -remove

Press Enter, type your Mac’s administrator password (the characters will remain invisible), and press Enter again.

Understanding the Output

The -remove flag is a powerful, destructive command. It immediately deletes all font cache files for the system, the active user, and the local machine. It also purges any custom font registration data, forcing the operating system to re-evaluate every single font installed on the hard drive.

The Terminal will output a confirmation message once the deletion is complete.

Restarting the Font Server

While the database files have been deleted from the hard drive, the Apple Type Server (ATS) daemon is still running in memory. You must force the font server to restart so that it can build a clean, uncorrupted database.

atsutil server -ping

This command “pings” the server to check its status.

Now, forcefully shut it down:

sudo atsutil server -shutdown

Wait approximately five seconds, and then start the server again:

sudo atsutil server -ping

macOS’s launchd system will automatically respawn the fontd process. The first time you open an application after executing this reset, it may take slightly longer to launch as the system rebuilds the required font caches, but all text rendering issues should be permanently resolved.