Have you ever wanted to just grab any old TrueType font of the web and start using it in applications on your Ubuntu machine? Did you know that you can and it’s not all that hard? Here’s how to get your system to recognize new fonts for any user.
First you’ve got to find a font you want to install. Open up your favorite search and look for true type fonts or .ttf files. I found a font called “A Cut Above The Rest” which I downloaded on to my desktop.
Now, you’ve got to do a little terminal magic (Applications-> Accessories -> Terminal) to move this file into the right place and regenerate your cache of fonts.
Once in your terminal, we’re going to head down to where Ubuntu keeps it’s fonts.
cd /usr/share/fonts/truetype
Let’s make a directory to store all of your downloaded fonts in. We’ll call it myfonts.
sudo mkdir myfonts
Now move into that directory.
cd myfonts
Okay, so you’re here and the font(s) you just downloaded are on your desktop. What to do? Move them to this location like this:
sudo mv /home/USERNAME/Desktop/*.ttf .
Replace USERNAME with your own. Grabbing any .ttf files with a wildcard (*) makes it easy for you to download a bunch to your desktop and then dump them into the right place.
Now that you’ve got your fonts where you want them, it’s time to tell Ubuntu that they’re here.
fc-cache -f -v ~/.font
You can now open any program that utilizes system fonts and access your new font. Let’s see how OO2 writer looks.
July 19th, 2007 at 12:17 pm
eeeeeeeeeeh, why not copy them to the ~/.fonts directory? Unless you have many users that needs to use many fonts…
July 19th, 2007 at 12:20 pm
Saves me a step. If I do have to let other users use my fonts (and with families, font sharing is something I encourage) I don’t have to copy fonts all over the place just so little Timmy can get the LivingDead.ttf file.
July 19th, 2007 at 4:14 pm
But, may I suggest that if you have your /home in a different partition (like I do) that if you want to share fonts, it could be a good idea to place it in a public directory on that drive and link it to /usr/share/fonts/truetype/mydir. That way, it could be possible to let users add fonts to it (without super-user privilege) and you can keep your fonts if there is a problem someday with your main os partition.
May 6th, 2008 at 12:20 am
I got stuck in step 4 (sudo mv home/username/Dekstop/*.ttf.) here’s what terminal said I am a very new person to this so mind my “noobiness”
mv: missing destination file operand after ‘/home/USERNAME/Dekstop/*.ttf.
Try mv –help for more information
I did remember to replace username with MY account name
May 6th, 2008 at 8:32 am
Hi Vinay,
You caught me in a typo. Try it again with the new line I inserted in the article.
Thanks!
Ben
January 12th, 2009 at 1:01 am
How to add ttf fonts on ubuntu
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4yebO-fRA8
March 18th, 2009 at 2:49 pm
I believe I’ve followed these directions exactly, but OO writer still doesn’t recognize them. I have all the fonts in /usr/share/fonts/myfonts and in /usr/share/fonts/truetype/myfonts. fc-cache claims to have succeeded and found the 53 files in both myfont directories, but nothing in /home/art/.font.
It would be helpful to know what the end state of the directories is. What is the purpose of /home/art/.font, and what should be in it?
March 18th, 2009 at 3:38 pm
I got OO Writer to see the fonts. The problem is that I didn’t change the mode of the ttf files to be readable to all users. While that is “obvious” I spent a lot of time trying everything else, including reading a lot of articles. So it would be good to add to the instructions:
sudo chmod 744 *.ttf
Gimp can also access the files but can’t interpret some.
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July 5th, 2010 at 7:51 am
Good Work I always had trouble with True Type Font. Hope I can follow those directions.