I'm using ubuntu 10.04. The font of gnome became very weird when I surfed the Internet.
I have used it for several months since the 10.04 is released. And I always install all the updates. It's the first time to meet such problem. I'm wondering what's the root cause.
I suggest you take a look at the question "Reset gnome font configuration?" which has an answer saying how to reset the GNOME font configuration, which I include a summary of below.
Try running the following in a terminal (Applications->Accessories->Terminal):
gconftool-2 --unset /desktop/gnome/interface/font_name
gconftool-2 --unset /desktop/gnome/interface/document_font_name
gconftool-2 --unset /desktop/gnome/interface/monospace_font_name
gconftool-2 --unset /apps/metacity/general/titlebar_font
gconftool-2 --unset /apps/nautilus/preferences/desktop_font
This looks a lot like glyph cache corruption. That's certainly not a real font or character set, but instead it is chopped up and mixed around pieces of the regular latin alphabet. You also have some random corruption in the form of those dashed lines on the right hand side.
This kind of bug is usually caused by your video card drivers, although it is not usually this severe. For example see the screenshots on this bug report:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=495323
It can also be caused by an overheating or failing video card or other hardware problems.
I have restarted the system to get things work again. The weird issue doesn't reproduce until now.
Your fonts configurations are on ~/.font.conf Try to rename it and restart your computer. If it works I think you can delete it, though you can keep it.
dmesg