How do I install ttf fonts?
 

I have a CD full of truetype fonts.

I've used them on Windows, where it's easy to install them, but I can't find any way to install them on linux.

I'm using Linux Mint 9. I expected to find some kind of font management utility built into the operating system, but there doesn't seem to be one.

How do I install my fonts into linux?

Have you tried using any of the font managers in the Ubuntu repository - like Fontmatrix and Fonty Python?

Thanks for the quick response.

No I haven't tried them yet. I looked at some info on the web about Fontmatrix but it looked like it was unfinished. I searched through Synaptic for 'font' but the list was so long I gave up about halfway through, so I never got as far as FontyPython.

I'll have another look at them. I was just assuming there'd be some built-in functionality to add fonts to the system.

The trick is "built-in to what?" It could be part of Ubuntu, or it could be part of the Desktop (eg Gnome or KDE)

Using KDE 4, I have a nice font manager. (It's a KDE feature since Arch by itself comes with **nothing**.)

Did you check Ubuntu documentation for installing fonts?

And you can install fonts manually.....

I use Fontmatrix myself and it's simple to import a font: just choose the folder or single file and import it into your font list via a right click. No need to convert or anything, it read OTF and TTF and they worked instantly in every application.

Font managers are nice, but you may not need them.

Copy the fonts into /usr/share/fonts/.

If you wish and if one does not exist, you can make a /usr/share/fonts/TTF or /usr/share/fonts/truetype directory and put them in there. That's probably a good idea, because it lets you keep track of the added fonts as opposed to the default fonts.

Reboot (there may also be a mkfont* utility you can run, depending on your distro, but the page that told me about it is gone).

More here: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-...ows-mac-linux/

also you can just plop them in your home folder i a .font folder

The simplest solution is this.
1. Click on the Home icon.
2. Press Ctrl-h to show the hidden stuff and look for a .fonts folder
3. If there isn't one, click on File and make one. Click on it.
4. Insert CD and get a display of its contents.
5. Drag and drop any useful fonts from the CD window into the .fonts window.
All done!

I did this method and it's nice and fast. I can't however keep all the typeface variants (bold/italic/standard etc) in their own tidy folders, Abiword fails to read them otherwise. Or am I doing something wrong?

You shouldn't need to do anything with the fonts but put them in the correct place. It may be an Abiword problem (in which case I can't help), but try the following in a terminal:

cd $HOME/.fonts
mkfontscale
mkfontdir
fc-cache