UI Font always black

So I had made a bunch of changes and added stuff from asset store and upgraded to 2018.1.0b13 when I noticed now my UI text was always shown in black. I had a devil of a time fixing it, but I noticed a few things.

It was only the one font I wanted to use (ofc right?) if I switched to any other font in my project the fonts were properly colored. This font was the only one that when I clicked the arrow to expand, it had a "Font Material" all of my other fonts had an empty spot there, this font I wanted had a material with a bunch of squished letters. If I dragged this font material over to each text element's material, it started rendering properly. Before this I had never assigned the material on any of my UI text and I had just left empty/none and it was using the UI/Default without an issue. I tried rolling back to b12 but was still an issue there.

Also just prior to the issue occurring, I had copied and pasted some text and buttons from a screen space overlay canvas to a screen space camera canvas to make a new ui dialog.

 

I have the same issue with all fonts because the default font uses a default font material. That turns black and any font without a material also turns black, however, if I just pick a random font material from the scene, it works okay. One problem I ran into after the fact, though, was stenciling issues.

 

i have a minimal repo case, but the bug requires easy save 3 from the asset store. since i'm not sure if i can legally send this code that's not mine, i'm trying to get it to the author of ES3 so he can submit the bug report.

 

This came up several times in the past. @LeonhardP could you perhaps add a FAQ or so in the How to Report Bugs document, that clarifies this?