After my upgrade of Mac OS X to Mountain Lion, my Drobo Dashboard decided that I didn’t need to read the text. After troubleshooting the issue with the very helpful tech support at Drobo, we came to the conclusion that most likely one of my fonts was corrupted.

I was asked to perform font validation on my system. To do this yourself, open Font Book, select one font, then hit select all, and then choose Validate Fonts.

I found a duplicate font, and some minor errors in a few fonts that I had installed over the years.

Turns out, the duplicate font was Arial, which is the base font that Drobo Dashboard uses. I removed the Arial font, but that didn’t immediately fix the problem. I had disabled the wrong one, the one that came with Mountain Lion, instead of the additional one. I replaced it, and Drobo Dashboard started working perfectly.

In the process of troubleshooting, though, I discovered the “styles.xml” file that controls which font Drobo Dashboard uses. Note this is with Drobo Dashboard for Mac, version 2.2.3. To edit it, navigate to your Application folder, and right-click on “Drobo Dashboard.app”. Choose Show Package Contents, and navigate to Contents / Resources / Styles / Default. Now, edit the styles.xml file in your favorite text editor. You can search and replace for the word “Arial”. Try replacing it with something fun, like “Marker Felt” or “Copperplate”. Feel free to experiment a bit, but note that not all fonts will work correctly. Also, of course, this is completely unsupported by Drobo or myself, and if you break it, you bought it, right? Don’t forget to save the file, and restart Drobo Dashboard each time you try a different font. If you mess up the styles.xml file, simply quit the Drobo Dashboard app, throw it away, and re-install it.

Enjoy!