When you first install Linux, you might be surprised at the fonts you have availble to you. Especially for users who haven't used Linux, and are coming to it from Windows or Mac OS X, the font names might be a tad unfamiliar. As an example, open up a word processor and look at the fonts menu.
Recognize some of those font names? Names like Lohit and Mukti and Phetsaroth and Khmer? Probably not. In fact, for native English speakers, the only fonts that might be at all recognizable are Bitstream, Courier, DejaVu and Ubuntu (and Ubuntu only because that's the distro you might have installed!). The rest are all for speakers (and writers) of other languages, and are filled with their characters. If you do all your work in English, those fonts are pretty useless for the most part.
Plus, it would be nice to have some of the fonts you're used to, fonts like Times New Roman and Arial and others (most familiar to Windows users, but fairly well-known for Mac users as well, of course). Thankfully, this is an easy problem to fix.
First, open up your Terminal.
We'll now get rid of some of the unnecessary fonts installed by default on our system. In Ubuntu, you can type sudo apt-get remove ttf-indic-fonts-core ttf-kacst-one ttf-khmeros-core ttf-lao ttf-opensymbol ttf-punjabi-fonts ttf-takao-pgothic ttf-thai-tlwg ttf-unfonts-core ttf-wqy-microhei –purge to do this.
Note: be careful when deleting fonts. For example, the game Chromium BSU, a top-down space shooter, requires the ttf-uralic package to be installed. Delete it and you may get rid of the game as well, without even realizing. Others, such as ttf-dejavu-core, are required for the Plymouth splash screen or other games or programs. In other words, before confirming the deletion of your fonts, see what other programs might be taken away as well.
Doing this is not so much to save hard drive space (we'll only free up 34 MB or so by deleting these fonts), but to clean up our font menus, which should now be quite a bit easier to read.
However, for users familiar with Microsoft, we're still missing quite a few fonts. You could, of course, copy over the fonts from your font folder in Windows, but the Microsoft Core Fonts (read this article for more information about Core Fonts for the Web), are available in the Ubuntu repositories.
These are slightly different (read: older) than the versions currently shipping with proprietary operating systems such as Windows or Mac OS X, but they should do just nicely for most people.
To install them, simply type sudo apt-get install ttf-mscorefonts-installer and you'll have them in no time.
Unlike most fonts, the core fonts are not open source, so the ttf-mscorefonts-installer package doesn't contain the fonts themselves. You'll need to first accept the EULA (end user license agreement) for the fonts.
Once you've done this, the fonts will be downoaded from the Internet and installed.
Finally, at the end of this process, your font menus should include such favorites as Arial, Comic Sans, Georgia, Times New Roman, Webdings, and more.
There are other fonts available, of course. Simply type sudo apt-get install ttf- and then hit the TAB key to see a full list of fonts available to install. Or you could hit a website such as dafont.com or fontspace.com for thousands of fonts, many completely free, some free for personal use.
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