Portal Loads, but there's no main menu!

it's a font bug, people.

Find an application called font book on your Mac. open it, and search for a font called Tahoma. When I searched for it, some of the different styles of the font were turned off. Select the fonts that are disabled, then click the empty checkmark box at the very bottom of your window. Portal menus should work just fine now!

Alternate Solution:

Originally Posted by BravePumpkins

The current temporary fix is to disable anti-aliasing.

Alfred of Valve advised to use this method:

- Right click the game in Steam and choose "Properties"
- Click "Launch Options" on that first tab
- Add "+mat_antialias 0" to that text edit box that comes up
- Hit okay and launch the game.

Two days ago, after downloading portal, everything worked fine, albeit the game took about a minute and a half to load.

Today (and yesterday), Portal loads (at the same speed) but the main menu is missing!
I click play within Steam, and after a few seconds, Portal opens. the valve/source logos show up, and then I am presented with a blurry image of the first chamber, with a loading indicator in the bottom right (as expected). After about a minute and a half, the blurriness goes away, the camera starts to move back and forth, the music starts playing, but there's no main menu!

It's not invisible, clicking where the menu would have been yields nothing. It's just plain gone!

My Computer:
17 inch Macbook Pro (non-unibody), Mac OSX 10.6.3
2.6Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo
4 GB 667Mhz DDR2 SDRAM
GeForce 8600M GT

It is there, you just can't use the mouse, you have to use the arrows. You can get the game to start, but there is still no text anywhere. I didn't play it because it was having some display issues. I'm just going to sit back and wait until they fix this. Free game, I won't get to irritated about it. Luckily they have fixed the games I have paid for.

Well, I'm glad to see I'm not the only one experiencing this. Hopefully it get's fixed soon.

I think I am having the same issue. What is happens for me is the game seems to be stuck on the loading screen, its blurry, and its constantly flashing (like a strobe light).

At the same time I have noticed that it appears like my downloads aren't finishing....the latest patch I've downloaded 70.7 out of 71.1 mb, and I can't seem to get that last .4 mb to download.

[JasonM]

Can you guys post your system configs, particularly the GPU?

-Jason

I'm on a Macbook

Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 2.16 GHz
Graphics: Intel GMA 950

I've played other games such as World of Warcraft (up to the latest expansion) on it with no problem.

Originally Posted by Elfabaa

I'm on a Macbook

Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 2.16 GHz
Graphics: Intel GMA 950

I've played other games such as World of Warcraft (up to the latest expansion) on it with no problem.

You don't meet the graphics card requirements.

...NVIDIA GeForce 8 or higher, or ATI X1600 or higher...

Thanks for looking into this, Jason.

*Bump*
For the sake of anyone else with this problem.

I have a 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo Macbook Pro 15" mid 2007. With an 8600 GT 256MB graphics card. In Windows everything runs fine. 60FPS+ everything on High, but in Mac OS X the game loads and the room becomes nice and crisp. The text of the menu doesnt show. No text shows up at all. I can use the keys to go to the invisible menus and lauch the game, but it doesn't give me text either. Changed reso from 1440x900 to 1280x800 in system prefs. Nothing happened. Please fix.

Originally Posted by Strigoi

I have a 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo Macbook Pro 15" mid 2007. With an 8600 GT 256MB graphics card. In Windows everything runs fine. 60FPS+ everything on High, but in Mac OS X the game loads and the room becomes nice and crisp. The text of the menu doesnt show. No text shows up at all. I can use the keys to go to the invisible menus and lauch the game, but it doesn't give me text either. Changed reso from 1440x900 to 1280x800 in system prefs. Nothing happened. Please fix.

Did you read the red text in my first post?

Excellent resource and accurate answer! Thank you for helping in this matter!

I'm having the exact same problem, game loads just fine but the menu boxes have no text.

I'm on a PC. I don't have specs because I'm on my laptop atm


EDIT: FIX
Ok, really easy fix guys. All I did was install the Tahoma font into my windows/fonts folder, fixs everything. I don't know why my PC was missing that font but getting the font off the web should be easy.

As of the most recent update yesterday, my main menu has also gone invisible. I have Tahoma installed, and it wasn't disabled. There was a duplicate copy of it, so I tried removing one of the duplicates; no luck. (Perhaps I removed the wrong one?)

Specs: Macbook Pro, 2.4GHz intel core 2 duo, 10.5.8, GeForce 8600M GT. Hmm, I seem to have the same machine as ionlygreat.

[Kyle6477]

Originally Posted by boojum99

As of the most recent update yesterday, my main menu has also gone invisible. I have Tahoma installed, and it wasn't disabled. There was a duplicate copy of it, so I tried removing one of the duplicates; no luck. (Perhaps I removed the wrong one?)

I wouldn't remove anything from your font book unless you really know what you're doing.

Post your specs here and wait for further communication from Valve.

I have the exact same problem. Played Portal for the first time yesterday, and everything was great. Then, when I reopened the game, the menu became invisible. I disabled tahoma, removed duplicates, uninstalled it, downloaded it and reinstalled it ... restarted my computer. Nothing worked.

Specs: Macbook Pro, 2.4 GHz, running 10.5.8, Intel Core 2 Duo, GeForce 8600M GT