Roboto font in dt 3.0 official OSX build

I’m running the official build of dt 3.0 for Mac on a 2017 Retina 4K
iMac under MacOS 10.14.6 (Mojave). I’ve installed the Roboto font set,
and I’m using the darktable-elegant-grey theme. However, the interface
seems not not to be using the Roboto font.

(I’ve rebooted the Mac since installing Roboto, but dt still doesn’t
pick it up.)

Any suggestions about how to get dt to use the Roboto font on Mac?

TIA

So I presume you used Font Book to install the font as a user font, and it placed it in your ~/Library/Fonts directory? In that case, you need to open a terminal, and do:

cd ~/Library/Fonts
mkfontscale

This rebuilds the X11 font index in that directory, and allows X11 apps like darktable to use the font.

Thanks for your reply. Yes, I used Font Book, and the font is in ~/Library/Fonts. (It’s a user font: it’s the only font in that directory; all the other fonts on the system are in the System directory /Library/Fonts.)

Sadly, when I cd to ~/Library/Fonts and do mkfontscale, I get
-bash: mkfontscale: command not found

Any thoughts?

Further to the above… I just removed the Roboto font set from the user Font directory, and installed them in /Library/Fonts, to make Roboto available system-wide. But dt still doesn’t use Roboto. (I’m checking this by comparing the ‘darktable’ theme with ‘darktable-elegant-grey’, which should be using Roboto.)

Sorry, looks like I gave you a bum steer. mkfontscale is part of the XQuartz package, but looks like darktable doesn’t have any dependency on that.

When I installed the Roboto font just using Font Book, it does make a difference to the fonts displayed by darktable, but it is very subtle. The most obvious difference is the kerning of “fi” in words like “file” – with Roboto font installed, you can see that there is no dot over the “i” when it comes after an “f”, but without Roboto font installed, you can see the dot over the “i” in “fi”. The sticks on the “d” are slightly longer, and the tail on the “a” is subtly different. But, at a quick glance, it’s hard to see the difference between Roboto and the fallback font. I wonder if in your case the Roboto font is being picked up, but it’s just that the changes are too subtle to notice?

the Apple system font San Francisco is very similar to Roboto, so if San Francisco is used by default it’s hard to see a difference in the font face until you compare them direct (for example the lower stroke of e)

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@Matt_Maguire @MStraeten Thanks, both, for your helpful replies. Yes, you’re right, dt is using Roboto on my machine; but, as you say, the difference from the default font is not very great. I’m a bit surprised, as the font in Aurélian’s recent videos about dt 3.0 looks more noticeably different in its width/height ratio (narrower and taller than it looks on my screen).

Anyway, thanks for your detailed information.