codex - 💡(How to fix) Fix Chinese text renders as boxed question marks in Settings on macOS

What happened?

After switching Codex Desktop to Chinese (zh-CN), parts of the Settings UI render Chinese text as boxed question marks instead of readable Chinese characters.

Some Chinese text renders correctly, but many labels and descriptions in Settings are broken. The issue is especially visible in:

• Settings left navigation labels
• Settings descriptions under General / Work Mode
• Other smaller UI text in Settings

English text such as Codex, Git, MCP, and Timeline still renders normally. Some larger Chinese headings also render normally, so this looks like a partial UI rendering/font fallback problem rather than the whole app failing to load Chinese.

Expected behavior

All Chinese UI text in Settings should render normally when the app language is set to Chinese.

Actual behavior

Many Chinese labels/descriptions appear as square boxes with question marks.

Environment

• App: Codex Desktop
• Version: 26.513.31313
• Platform: macOS
• Device: MacBook Air
• Language setting: zh-CN

Troubleshooting already tried

I checked the following locally:

• Other macOS apps display Chinese normally, so this does not appear to be a system-wide font issue.
• localeOverride is set to zh-CN in Codex global state.
• macOS Chinese fonts are installed, including Hiragino Sans GB, STHeiti, and Songti.
• Restarted Codex.
• Cleared Codex UI/GPU/code caches:
  • ~/Library/Application Support/Codex/Cache
  • ~/Library/Application Support/Codex/GPUCache
  • ~/Library/Application Support/Codex/DawnGraphiteCache
  • ~/Library/Application Support/Codex/DawnWebGPUCache
  • ~/Library/Application Support/Codex/Code Cache
• Temporarily tried setting the UI font in .codex-global-state.json, but Codex rewrote that state on restart and the issue persisted.

The issue still persists after those steps.

Related issues

This may be related to existing localization issues, but the symptom is different because the UI does switch to Chinese partially, while some Chinese text is rendered as boxed question marks:

• #19239
• #19518
• #19795
• #16540

Notes

This started suddenly after previously working normally. It happened before installing Codex++ on the machine, so Codex++ does not appear to be the root cause.