Installing Windows Fonts in Linux

Ken Ju-On · 07-04-2003, 05:18 PM

Hi all.

I'm on SuSE 8.2 and I want to use the popular Windows fonts like Arial, Times New Roman, Tahoma on Linux. I know that I can, much to the dismay of Micro$oft, simply drag and drop to a certain directory, but I don't know which directory I should drag and drop to. (i.e. the Linux equivalent of C:\WINDOWS\FONTS\)

Can someone please tell me the folder into which I much drag and drop my Windows fonts? Please tell me any relevant information I should be aware of as well.

Thanks a million.

Hyper newbie, I am.

contrasutra · 07-04-2003, 05:37 PM

drop them in: /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TTF

and restart.

nautilus_1987 · 07-05-2003, 05:31 AM

well actually this is a messy way. I think all you have to do is open KDE Control Center -> system -> Fonts. Choose the directory where your fonts are located and click Apply or install (whatever). And now you fonts will be fully installed. try this way I always do that like

Ken Ju-On · 07-05-2003, 03:15 PM

Thanks a lot. I created the directory /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TTF and dragged and dropped my Windows fonts into there. It worked perfectly.

Thanks again, everyone, for your help.

nick2112 · 07-05-2003, 08:21 PM

All right, can someone please explain Linux fonts to me?

I read through this thread. First I copied a bunch of True-Type fonts from Windows to my /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TTF directory and restarted X. KDE doesn't seem to know anything about them.

Next, I looked in the KDE Control-Center. I have no idea what "KDE Control Center -> system -> Fonts" means. There is no "system" section. There is a "System Administration" section, but there is nothing about fonts under it. In fact the only things about fonts in the whole "Control Center" is to set fonts for the web-browser or for the desktop. There is absolutly nothing there for adding new fonts.

My ultimate goal is to get these new fonts to work with OpenOffice 1.1 (beta 2). I have been searching the internet the last few days, and all I have really discoved is that fonts really suck under Linux and are not handled well. (I've seen hundreds of posts of people b*tch*ng about fonts).

Any body have some tips on how to get new fonts installed and actually RECOGNIZED and USED under X11 and KDE?

Thanks for any info....

---nick

Ken Ju-On · 07-06-2003, 04:30 AM

As far as I know, you're very close to what you want, Nick. You just have to look in the right KDE Control Center module; I think it's "Appearance and Themes". In there, there's another module named "Fonts". Check that out and if you've installed the fonts in the right directory, all the happy happy Windows fonts like Arial and Times New Roman should be available to you.

Thanks to the helpful and wise people from this forum, I've been able to use my Windows fonts into Linux with minimum hassle. Thank you all!!

biomedr · 07-07-2003, 12:24 AM

I'm using RedHat 9. Drag&Drop copies the font files (I have to log in as root for this) and Open office finds the fonts after logging out and back in. (Even that may not be necessary.)

But neither KDE nor Gnome sees those fonts, and the kdefontinstall I remember from earlier KDE installations just isn't there. I have not installed KOffice. Is it part of that?

I will just have top go through the manual installation process. I will have to search for it again. I do remember that there were 2 commands to remake the fonts.dir and fonts.scale files. You can edit them manually, but if you want a lot of fonts that's a lot of typing.

mhearn · 07-07-2003, 05:07 AM

In Red Hat 9, there is an easier way (in gnome)

open fonts:/// in nautilus, then drop the files in. You may need to run

fc-cache

as root for all the apps to detect them (and some apps need to be restarted, but afaik the same is true on windows).

aherm · 07-07-2003, 05:30 AM

I noticed that SuSE has a better true type fonts installer built inside KDE control center.

Other than that you can manually install windows true type fonts this way:

Copy your windows TTF fonts to e.g.
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TTF
then
Edit your /etc/X11/XF86Config (or XF86Config-4)
to have

#
Section "Files"
FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TTF"

(run SuSEconfig if you have SuSE or)
then restart your X

håkon · 07-07-2003, 04:48 PM

aherm, I tried that. It didn't work on my system (debian sarge).
Do you need to install the xfstt font server or something?

Hoax · 07-07-2003, 05:08 PM

thankfully mandrake 9.1 comes with a clean and readable look out of the box i after i installed opera the fonts were BLINDING me so the easy way was to pick them from the windows partition and implement them in kde with the look and feel manager.
for all those on other distros(or people without windows) this url might be helpfull:
http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/

Hoax

håkon · 07-07-2003, 06:18 PM

In debian i did this:
apt-get install msttcorefonts
i then copied all the fonts intor the directory
/usr/lib/X11/fonts/TrueType
the i downloaded the fttols
apt-get install fttools
i then ran the commando
mkttfdir /usr/lib/X11/fonts/TrueType/
and added the path to the truetype dir into the /etc/X11//etc/X11/XF86Config-4 and restarted X, it worked