Missing letters in menus and folder names

There seems to be a (bad) fix for this problem as described here

The problem seems not to appear by using the old UXA hardware acceleration for for the Intel graphic cards.

Edit the following section of the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file such that AccelMethod is set to "uxa" or create the file if it does not yet exist:

Section "Device"
   Identifier  "Intel Graphics"
   Driver      "intel"
   Option      "AccelMethod"  "uxa"
EndSection

Reboot or restart X.

The problem went away for me, but I only restarted a couple of times since I changed the file so it might still come back. Also, note that UXA acceleration is considerably slower!

edit: There is a fix for this in the repository by now. If you still experience this issue you either did not update your system for a while or it has a different cause and I suggest filing a new bug.

As mentioned in the comment above regarding the missing letters link, I have this specific problem (on 16.04, usually after returning from suspend), and so far, using unity/gnome tweak and switching fonts to greyscale anti-aliasing is working: https://askubuntu.com/a/633435/172307

This fixed the problem for me, Updated and Optimized Open Graphics Drivers

https://launchpad.net/~oibaf/+archive/ubuntu/graphics-drivers

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:oibaf/graphics-drivers
sudo apt-get update