Fonts in Ubuntu

**Stochastic** · July 28th, 2009

Hey, just curious if there's an easy way to find fonts in the Ubuntu repositories? Do they all start with the same ttf string, or is that just a subset of what's available?

**Nevon** · July 28th, 2009

To check the repositories, you could always do a

Code:

apt-cache search fonts

But you can actually install fonts separately, just like you would in Windows or Mac. Just drop them in /usr/share/fonts/Truetype or ~/.fonts and then just log in and out.

**Stochastic** · July 28th, 2009

I'm not actually interested in installing them on my own machine (that's an easy task), I'm looking to create a metapackage of font packages, and I'm just a bit lost as to which formats of fonts are categorized by what strings in the listing that apt-cache spews out.

I'm also actually just looking for font packages, whereas apt-cache search fonts (or font) gives fun little things like

Code:

tex-guy - miscellaneous utilities using DVIlib

Oh, and to be even more troublesome, I'd like to keep everything to the main or universe repositories (that part is the easy part for me, I need direction on how to separate fonts from libraries from programs when reading apt-cache spews mostly).

**Hairy_Palms** · July 28th, 2009

could try doing
sudo dpkg-query -S .ttf
it will return all packages containing files with .ttf in the filenames

**Stochastic** · July 28th, 2009

Are true type fonts the only decent font format?

**Hairy_Palms** · July 28th, 2009

Are true type fonts the only decent font format?

i dont know, but for other formats it would just be a case of substituting .ttf for .fontextension

**AJB2K3** · July 28th, 2009

No ttf is not the only decent type.
ttf is only one of the sets available
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrueType

**Stochastic** · July 29th, 2009

AJB2K3, Thanks, you've given me half the information I need... The other half would be which other sets are decent? I recall that some fonts are bitmaps etc... and want to stay away from those.

**wojox** · July 29th, 2009

http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Font-HOWTO/

I like mac fonts:

Download the font package :

$wget http://ubuntu-debs.googlecode.com/files/macfonts.tar.gz

Untar and move it :

$tar zxvf macfonts.tar.gz
$sudo mv macfonts/*.* /usr/share/fonts/

Reload font cache :

$sudo fc-cache -f -v