Installing fonts on Linux

Are you a Graphic Designer or do lot of Graphic publishing work on GIMP (Gnu Image Manipulation Program) or any other program you would want many fonts to play with them.

It is surely and not difficult to install fonts on Linux Platform, you can say its as easy as installing on windows. It will take not more than 2-5 minutes if you just follow the below instructions. We are going to install TTF ( true type fonts ) on the system per user and global basis.

Obviously the best method and handy method in Linux is doing it from command line.

First search for the fonts you want to install on the system. Google out you will get a ocean of sites. Check it if you like download the font to your local system.

We'll start of the installation with Per User Installation

In this type of installation only the user who is targeted has the access to the fonts.

Steps

1. Download the Fonts to local system.

2. mkdir ~/.fonts (where ~ is the home directory of the user)

3. mv *ttf *TTF ~/.fonts

Thats it Now log out of your desktop environment and log back in. Check the fonts in GIMP or Openoffice applications

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:

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  mkdir   -p /usr/local/share/fonts/ttfonts

  
  


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  mv *ttf *TTF /usr/local/share/fonts/ttfonts

  
  


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  cd   /usr/local/share/fonts/ttfonts

  
  


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  ttmkfdir   -o fonts.scale

  
  


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  mkfontdir

  
  


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  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.

Game Over.