techblog 

My MS Word on OSX has been crashing regularly for months, normally when I do something foolish like open a document, especially one that has been emailed to me.

I was also getting another problem that I did not realise was related.  Occasionally I would print out a document only to find that every character had been replaced with a random different character from the full character palette.  So letters, symbols, characters from other languages and so on.  Yet the formatting of the document was not affected.

In addition to that I very occasionally opened a document in Preview that was similarly affected, with all the character replaced.

One of my colleagues had the same issue and managed to track it down.  Looking in the Console he came across numerous references to ATS.framework at the time of the crashes.  ATS is the Apple Type (as in typefaces) Server and I then put two and two together to get the solution.

It turns out that OSX has things called font caches and they can get corrupt.  When they do MS Word crashes a lot and other things can get unhappy.  To clear the problem you can use a simple tool called Font Finagler.  This deletes your corrupted font caches (glyphs at various points sizes?) and the problem goes away.