I have recently been learning DT, and love it - as a replacement for Lightroom 6 standalone. I was on macOS Catalina, and installed macOS Big Sur (11.6) on my MacBook Air last week. Every single app works, but DT does not show fonts correctly - they are all mixed up with the wrong characters, and are blurred. I have spent many hours attempting to work out what has gone wrong (me, the Mac or DT), and eventually asked a friend ( a skilled backend programmer) for his opinion. He has looked at the evidence, and concluded:
It’s font rendering problems, and it seems like it is caching the rendered characters, as it shows the same wrong glyph for the same character in various places.
Darktable is built on GTK3, and this looks like a GTK bug or temporary GTK issue. The issue is between GTK3 and macOS somewhere. It’s probably not a Darktable-specific issue.
Having looked online for GTK and Big Sur issues, it does seem that there is a known conflict. Having now tried it on two separate Macs, and the issue is present in both, this could mean that DT is now unusable on all Macs on Big Sur - if I am a typical Mac user.
The only glimmer of hope, as the moment, is that GTK 3.2 appears to cure the issue, but that means a new version of DT will need to be released. I wonder if the developers read these threads.
I shall be grateful for any help with this, as I am not skilled enough to correct it. Unfortunately, darktable is not useable now on my MacBook Air, as it is illegible. It still works on my iMac, which is still running macOS Catalina (10.15.7).
As far as I can tell, I have no other apps built with GTK. I wonder if I am the only person in the world with this issue in DT!
@MStraeten has been putting out some builds for macOS which I’m sure don’t have this problem. Perhaps he can weigh in.
I‘m using darktable on BigSur and don’t have font issues. Do you have roboto font installed?
I had read that roboto was possibly required. I could see that it is in a fonts folder for another app, so I downloaded the roboto font and installed it using Font Book, which put it in ~/Library/Fonts. However, that made no difference, so I uninstalled it. Perhaps it was installed i the wrong Fonts folder. Where do you have roboto installed?
/library/fonts but that shouldn’t make a difference …
Which theme do you use? Maybe you’d better use one of the darktable-elegant* or darktable-icons* themes because they define explicit fonts to be used:
{
font-family: "Roboto Light", "Roboto", /* best case scenario */
"Segoe UI Light", "Segoe UI", /* Windows 10 default */
"SF Pro Display Light", "SF Pro Display", /* Mac OS X default */
"Ubuntu Light", "Ubuntu", /* Ubuntu default */
"Cantarell", /* Gnome default */
sans-serif; /* default default */
}
usually the first match is used.
Sorry - your post arrived after I had shut down for the night. However, that gave me the chance to experiment a lot this morning (amongst a load of interruptions!). I have reinstalled roboto (in ~/Library/Fonts) and selected various of the ‘themes’. Luckily, I’ve still got DT working in Catalina on an iMac, so I could work out where in the theme dropdown list the options are - otherwise it was all totally illegible. You are absolutely right - darktable-icons-darker and darktable-elegant-darker are ideal for me - and they all work correctly, except for ‘darktable-icons’ and ‘darktable’ (but that doesn’t matter to me).
Thank you so much for your help. I thought I had tried everything in the past, but I had clearly not, or I had not done it properly.
I’m intrigued to know where the css file is from which you have quoted. I haven’t found it anywhere.
Hopefelly, my problems - now cured - will be of help to someone else.