Why is my Mac suddenly showing cartoon fonts?

Factual Questions
1

I have a (relatively) new Mac, and I just got around to porting the data from my old machine to it.

A few weeks ago (I’ve been traveling a lot, so I haven’t had time to deal with these problems) I installed Linotype FontExplorer (a font management program), which I had been using on my old machine (which was running Snow Leopard; new machine is on Mavericks). I suddenly found myself unable to use DropBox, which is life-threatening for my business (I share a lot of files with cow-orkers), so I uninstalled FontExplorer. On restart, DropBox began working again. Phew.

However, I noticed something super-odd: My machine started using a cartoon font as a default in several applications, particularly my web browsers. Here’s a screenshot of Chrome, for example, and Firefox is similar.

Any advice?

(On preview, I need to add another parenthetical, because I use an insane amount of them.) (Apparently.)

2

Here’s an article on how to play a *hilarious *prank on someone and change their system font to Comic Sans. Can you use it to change yours back?

3

The Linotype app may have messed up your standard fonts.

You could try going into Font Book, and under File, choosing Restore Standard Fonts. You may get a warning that if you proceed, non-standard fonts will be removed from the system font database.

If you proceed, you might have to restart the machine to see any difference.

4

OS X has its own, built-in font management program- Font Book.
You should fire it up and see what’s going on.

5

Ah! Thanks for the heads-up about Font Book. I’ve been using Macs exclusively since 1993, and I’m embarrassed to say that this is the first I’ve heard of the application.

Restoring the System Fonts fixed the issue. Thanks, all!