Naturally one of the issues with fonts is where to get them. If you do a search for “free fonts” you will come up with plenty of sites that offer fonts. There are even sites that sell fonts for a reasonable price. Of course if you are serious about desktop publishing or graphics you will want to look at higher quality fonts. On with the installation.

Per User Installation

By far the easiest installation is the per user installation. What this type of install does is install the fonts in such a way that only the targeted use has access to the fonts. For this type of installation download all of your fonts into a directory the user has access to (the ~/Downloads directory works fine.) Once you have your fonts collected (You will most likely have to unzip each file which will result in either .ttf or .TTF files) do the following (all in a terminal window) within the directory containing your downloaded fonts.

mkdir ~/.fonts

mv *ttf *TTF ~/.fonts

Now log out of your desktop environment and log back in. Those fonts should now be available to you. If you’re unsure you can fire up either OpenOffice or The GIMP to see if your fonts are available. They should be.

Global Installation

Installing fonts globally allows all users access to the fonts. This is not as simple as installing per-user but it is still simple. You sill have to download all of your fonts. Once you have them downloaded unzip the files (making sure all the *ttf and *TTF files are in the same directory) and su to the root user. Once you are the root user issue the following commands:

• mkdir   -p /usr/local/share/fonts/ttfonts
• mv *ttf *TTF /usr/local/share/fonts/ttfonts
• cd   /usr/local/share/fonts/ttfonts
• ttmkfdir   -o fonts.scale
• mkfontdir
• chkfontpath   –add /usr/local/share/fonts/ttfonts
• /etc/rc.d/init.d/xfs   restart

Now log out of your desktop and you can log in as any user and the fonts will be available to them.

Final Thoughts

See, installing fonts in Linux isn’t difficult – especially when installing on a per user basis. For most people the first method will suffice. Unless you work on a machine that is used by more than one user, you will only need the per user method. Of course if the global installation method is a bit daunting you can always copy the fonts into the ~/.fonts directory of every user that needs access to the various true type fonts.

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New fonts can be nice for local websites or documents as well but I honestly was never a huge fan of that. Still, if you are looking for new fonts you should definitely take the time to visit the Font Cubes website which hosts an extensive font collection. Font cubes is a non-commercial website which does not mix free and commercial fonts like so many other font websites do.

A special feature is that the font is shown in its complete form and not only partially which is great if you are looking for a font that does have a specific char. Fonts are rated and the website offers several ways of listing fonts for the users. It is for instance possible to take a look at the most popular fonts, the highest rated fonts or the most downloaded fonts of the day.

Instructions on how to download and install the fonts are available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

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