Installing TTF fonts in Linux

Recently, I was asked how to get downloaded fonts onto an Ubuntu workstation in order to make prettier documents in OpenOffice -- there's two methods to doing this, which I thought i'd document for anyone having difficulties doing it themselves.

This article works on a Fedora 8, an Ubuntu 7.10 and an Ubuntu 6.06 machine -- but mainly relies on an XFree86 4.2 (or later) install with the fontconfig package installed (most current distributions have this installed already).

Method One: Single-user Fonts

Individual Users can install fonts by opening a terminal (Accessories -> Terminal) and making a .fonts directory in their home directory, like:

mkdir -p .fonts

Then, find a TTF font you like (Google thinks here is a good place to start looking) -- download it, extract it (fonts are usually distributed in .zip archives, so you'll need to extract the .ttf font file from it first) and copy it to the .fonts directory you just made.

Then you can either logout and login again, or restart the application you want the fonts to appear in and they should appear for use.

Method Two: System-wide Fonts

Administrators can install fonts by opening a terminal (Accessories -> Terminal), becoming the root user using either:

su - (Fedora)

or:

sudo -s (Ubuntu)

Then making a specific directory in the font location on their machine for TTF fonts (usually /usr/share/fonts/truetype), like:

mkdir -p /usr/share/fonts/truetype/winfonts

Download and extract the fonts to the new winfonts directory you made above, then update the font cache information for the machine by typing:

fc-cache -f -v

note: Some older Linux distributions (Fedora Core 3 and KUbuntu 5.04 both need this) may need to run:

mkfontscale && mkfontdir as the root user before running the fc-cache command above, so that your machine correctly creates a fonts.dir file that can be found by fc-cache.

If you're interested in Free and Open Sourced fonts, you should look at Ed Trager's site on the subject.