I did the following search in Google: "How to Save the World in your Spare Time" Some words in the results displayed with the first letter and the second letter overlapping. Other searches resulted in the same problem. Safari 3 displayed the results correctly.
Created attachment 15939 [details] Screen capture of results page
Oops ... this is a much more general problem ... it seems to apply to many sites. Google is just one example.
I can't reproduce this with this URL: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&client=safari&rls=en&q=%22How+to+Save+the+World+in+your+Spare+Time%22&btnG=Search Using a local debug build of WebKit r25023 with Safari 3 Public Beta v. 3.0.3 (522.12.1) on Mac OS X 10.4.10 (8R18). Patricia, what is the exact search URL that you're using? You may be hitting different Google servers. Are you logged into Google when this happens?
It's not happening any more but I think I restarted my computer in the meantime. It definitely was repeatable when I created the bug.
This seems to happen sometimes when fonts are removed or replaced on the system while Safari is open. <rdar://problem/5735163>
*** Bug 17495 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
(In reply to comment #5) > This seems to happen sometimes when fonts are removed or replaced on the system > while Safari is open. > > <rdar://problem/5735163> That bug was fixed in <http://trac.webkit.org/changeset/35025>.