Ubuntu – Font Substitution — “Roboto, Bold” for “Roboto Bold”

fontslibreoffice

There are a few answers here about how to substitute non-installed fonts, but I haven't quite found an answer to this question.

On my designer's system (Mac) she has the "Roboto" font family in which she has all of the styles — Roboto, Roboto Black, Roboto Bold, etc. However when she creates some text in Roboto Bold, on my system (Ubuntu 18.04) where I have the same font files installed, Libreoffice and other apps tell me that the "Roboto Bold" font is not installed, and instead I have to choose the "Roboto" font and mark it as bold. If I do that then the font shows up as identical to "Roboto Bold" on her system.

However the problem is that when she marks text as "Roboto Bold" it substitutes the text as "Roboto" on Ubuntu and does not show up as bold. What I would like is for the "Roboto Bold" font text that she creates to be substituted with "Roboto, Bold" text on Ubuntu so it shows up as Roboto font, in bold, for me.

Is there a font manager config / .fonts.conf configuration that will achieve that?

Best Answer

This is really not a definitive answer, but rather an attempt to dig a bit deeper into the issue, which possibly can help the progress with solving it.

I installed the fonts-roboto-unhinted package, and had a look at the Roboto-Bold.ttf file.

cd /usr/share/fonts/truetype/roboto/unhinted/RobotoTTF
fc-query Roboto-Bold.ttf | grep -E 'name:|family:|style:'
    family: "Roboto"(s)
    style: "Bold"(s)
    fullname: "Roboto Bold"(s)
    postscriptname: "Roboto-Bold"(s)

It looks like your designer is using "fullname", while LibreOffice focuses on "family" and "style" to refer to the desired font / font weight. What this shows is that all those keys are available also on Ubuntu.

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