Fonts

Administration

Installing Fonts on Ubuntu

• References
  • See here.

Fonts are kept in different locations, as defined in /etc/fonts/fonts.conf. By default these are:

• /usr/share/fonts
• /usr/local/share/fonts
• /home/username/.fonts

To install a new font, copy the font to the relevant directory (or a sub-directory), and update the cache with

sudo fc-cache -f -v

Alternatively the cache is immediately refreshed after reboot.

For instance to install Arial Unicode MS (ARIALUNI.TTF, can be found on Windows XP for instance):

sudo mkdir /usr/share/fonts/truetype/windows
sudo cp ARIALUNI.TTF /usr/share/fonts/truetype/windows
sudo chmod 644 /usr/share/fonts/truetype/windows/*
sudo fc-cache -f -v

Querying font

fc-match matches available fonts:

fc-match calibri

calibri.ttf: "Calibri" "Regular"

Use ttfdump to display content of a TTF/OTF font:

ttfdump somefont.ttf

Viewing font

Use display (from ImageMagick):

display somefont.ttf

To compare / browse fonts, use Font Manager (package font-manager).

Other tools:

• Gnome Font Viewer (gnome-font-viewer), but very slow / bad.
• FontyPython (fontypython), but strange, not convenient.

Nice Fonts

• List of monospace fonts
• What are the best programming fonts?

Monospace

Fantasque Sans Mono

• Seen in gruvbox screenshots.

Fira

• Seen in gruvbox screenshots.

Bitstream Vera Sans Mono

My previous favorite

Consolas

DejaVu Sans Mono

Based on BitStream Vera (almost identical), but with better Unicode support.

Inconsolata

Looks nice but fonts are really small at size 9

Lucida Console

My current favorite for terminal, got from MacBuntu 10.04 theme

Monospace

Same as Bitstream Vera Sans Mono

Source Code Pro

Ubuntu Mono

Serif

• Roboto Slab

Nice Serif fonts, see this site. Download.

Best combined with Roboto.

• Source Serif Pro

Sans

• Source Sans Pro

Technical

Font rendering

• A Closer Look At Font Rendering

Troubleshooting

MS Fonts not rendering correctly

This occurs for instance with font Calibri. At small size, normal character appears aliased, but ligatures are anti-aliased.

Solution is to disable use of embedded bitmaps [1]:

• Add to file ~/.config/font-manager/local.conf (before Ubuntu 14.04, edit ~/.fonts.conf. Some tips also suggest file ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf):

<!-- disable embedded bitmaps in fonts to fix Calibri, Cambria, etc. -->
<match target="font">
        <edit mode="assign" name="embeddedbitmap"><bool>false</bool></edit>
</match>

• rebuild font cache:

sudo fc-cache -v -f

• Restart compiz:

compiz --replace&