HOWTO: Tahoma Font in Breezy

[Casey]

As far as I can tell, microsoft distributes this under a different license than the other true type core fonts. I think that you have to have a valid windows license to use this.

I did this for a friend who wanted to use Tahoma in Breezy.
The msttcorefonts package was already installed in this case. It is a prereq for this to work that you install the msttcorefonts package (to create the directory that we will use). You could modify this to use a different fonts directory, but this howto would not cover it).

Disclaimer: I don't have a Windows license so as far as I can tell I am not allowed to do this by the license. Therefore I really can't help if it doesn't work, though I don't see any reason it wouldn't work (it worked on my friend's copy of breezy).

The first step is to install cabextract if you do not already have it installed. You can do this through synaptic. If you have already installed the msttcorefonts package (which creates a directory that we use later and thus is necessary), then you do not need to perform this step, as cabextract was installed at that time.

Next download the tahoma font package from microsoft. It is available here:
http://download.microsoft.com/downlo...US/IELPKTH.CAB

I obtained this link from the .spec file at http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/

Next, using the terminal navigate to the directory to which you downloaded the file. For my friend, this was the desktop.

cd Desktop

At this point a new folder was created:

mkdir tahomafont

Now the downloaded font was moved to the tahomafont folder:

mv IELPKTH.CAB tahomafont

Now the directory was changed to the tahomafont folder:

cd tahomafont

Now the cabextract utility was used on the .CAB file:

cabextract IELPKTH.CAB

Now the resulting .ttf files were copied to the msttcorefonts folder in the system's fonts directory (note this step will require sudo):

sudo cp *.ttf /usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts/

Now the fonts should be installed. Open up the Gnome font selector (System->Preferences->Font) and insure that the Tahoma font is available in both regular and bold forms.

Edit: At this point feel free to delete the tahomafont directory that you created, as well as all of its contents.

Hopefully this will be of assistance to some people.