Font Setup Mini Howto

Background
Since most installations of Linux are free both in the monetary sense and licensing sense, the default fonts that are shipped with the distributions are decent but not great. For this reason, Linux does not look near as good as Windows (or Apple) by default. If you happen to have a legal copy of Windows, it is possible to use the true-type fonts from Windows in your Linux distribution. There have been several howtos written on this subject, however, I have found that most are outdated and there is a much eaiser way to do this now days.

PLEASE NOTE: This method will only work if your XFree86 version is 4.0 or greater. If you don't know what version of XFree86 you are running, enter the following command

Code:

XFree86 -version

Instructions
First of all, you must place the fonts into a directory where they can be used by linux. These fonts can be found in a normal installation of Windows under the directory: c:\winnt\fonts

Because of NTFS file system problems and the need to set permissions on these files, they will need to be copied into your linux file system. Copy these into a directory of your chosing on you linux system, /usr/local/share/fonts/ttfonts is as good a location as any and the rest of this document assumes that the fonts are here.

This directory and its contents must be readable by all. I would put the ownership to root though and allow only root write access. To do this, issue the following command as root:

Now, you need to direct your system to use these fonts. This is done by adding this directory entry into the file located at /etc/fonts/fonts.conf. Near the top of this file you should see the following

Simply add your true-type fonts directory in this list so that is looks like:

Thats it. You can restart your system or if you want immediate results, type in
This will update your fonts and give you all the familiar fonts.

Hopefully, this will help someone. I have been living with sub-par fonts in Linux for too long. Now I finally have the clear, crisp and familiar fonts that I am used to in Windows.

UPDATE

It appears that with newer versions, it is recommended that you dont make any changes in the font.conf file and instead make a file called local.conf in the same directory and place any updates in there.

So I now make a local.conf file with this line only in it:

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