All system characters garbled

[GeoffLV]

I'm not sure if this situation is Mate specific but that's what I'm using.

I've just followed the upgrade process from 19.3 to 20 using the procedure here. After downgrading and removing the PPAs and foreign packages, as recommended, the long upgrade process seemed to go well, asking for a couple of reboots on the way. After the final reboot, the system came up and I logged in.

Unfortunately, the desktop text, panel text and all menu characters throughout the system are "garbled" (for want of a better term) as in this screen photo (poor quality but it shows well enough):-



The system is virtually unusable in that state even for an attempt to fix it, I can't tell what anything is doing. However I have use of the terminal:- the text I type in a terminal is correct and in English, as is its output.

The locale command gives:-
Lang=en_GB.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="en_GB.UTF-8"
folowed by several other LC_ fields set to the same

Any ideas how to fix from command line?.

[AndyMH]

As far as I am aware, prior to LM20 the default system font was noto-sans and switched to ubuntu with LM20. Try:
sudo apt-get install ttf-ubuntu-font-family

[GeoffLV]

Thanks very much for your reply.

I installed that font family and rebooted the system, however the garbled chars remain.
Perhaps there is a config file somewhere that needs updating as well?

[AndyMH]

Might help:
viewtopic.php?p=1625588#p1625588

[GeoffLV]

Thanks again - a lot of success.
Trying some of those calls to gsettings with slightly modified schemas restored most of the garbling to normal text.
There are still a couple of cases, it's a case of finding the right keys to set to suitable values.