This is almost certainly a problem with my machine/install, but I’m not sure what to try to resolve it. As you can see in the screenshot, the labels of many toolbar items are not rendering — Each character is rendering as a “missing character glyph”.
I’ve tried Audacity 3.7 and 3.6 — issue is present on both
I did remember to add executable permissions to the AppImages
Changing the theme from light → dark and vice versa does not resolve the issue
I have reinstalled ubuntu-desktop and refreshed fc-cache to make sure all system fonts are present as expected. After reboot, no change. What else should I try?
I’ve not seen that problem before, but we can rule out some possible causes with these steps. I am assuming that the AppImage file is called “audacity-linux-3.7.1-x64-20.04.AppImage” and that you have made it executable.
Create an empty folder to contain the Audacity application, and name it appropriately.
Move the Audacity .AppImage file into the folder.
Open a terminal window in that folder (or navigate to that folder).
The above command creates a folder alongside the AppImage to store Audacity’s settings, which should avoid any previous version of Audacity interfering with it.
You can then close the Terminal and run the AppImage.
My guess is that Audacity requires a specific font that isn’t present on your computer, and for some reason is not able to fall back to a generic font. I’d suggest that you report the issue as a bug on GitHub: Issues · audacity/audacity · GitHub (free registration required). By reporting it yourself you will (by default) be notified of replies, so you will be able to see replies and respond if appropriate.