Installing Microsoft ttf fonts on Ubuntu

08
2013-08
  • therefromhere

    I want to install a Microsoft Vista TTF font (lets say Consolas), on Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope).

    How do I go about doing that?

    • Answers
  • Diago

    This article explains how to install the Microsoft fonts on Ubuntu step by step. It's part of the Universe repository.

    This article explain how to install the Vista fonts which includes Consolas on Ubuntu. You need to extract the fonts from the Microsoft Powerpoint Viewer.

  • therefromhere

    If you've got a Windows machine handy (IANAL but I think you need a Vista licence in order to legally use the Consolas font), copy the file somewhere convenient.

    Then in a terminal:

    sudo cp *.ttf /usr/local/share/fonts
cd /usr/local/share/fonts
sudo chown root:root *.ttf
sudo fc-cache
  • Kirill

    Check out this script.

    winetricks is a quick and dirty script to download and install various redistributable runtime libraries...


    • Related Question

    adobe photoshop - What ways are there (programs used...) to create fonts?
  • Maxim Zaslavsky

    I'm intersted in creating some TrueType fonts, and I've seen and tried some online creation tools that let you scan in your handwriting (such as FontCapture), but I'm looking for a more manual approach that would let me edit and design each character individually, for more precision and creativity. I also have a tablet, which is why I'm pursuing this. Do you know of any manual editing tools that can let me accomplish this?

    I'm also experienced in Illustrator and Photoshop, so is there a method to create a font file from saved images of each letter, created in Photoshop?

    On another note, I'm also looking for a .NET library to create a font file programmatically, but that will go on StackOverflow.

    Thanks in advance!

    UPDATE: I completely forgot to mention what OS I'm using and what OS I'm targeting for the fonts - that would be Windows.

    UPDATE #2: I guess that my main question is how to manually create a TrueType font if you have all the images for the letters (if TrueType is the way to go). One of the answerers suggested Fontographer, but I think that's a little too customized - are there any bare-bones free (maybe even open-source) tools that just compile a font? Thanks again!

    UPDATE #3: Sorry for so many updates, but I just looked at a tutorial of creating a font with Photoshop and Fontographer - Fontographer seems like a very good solution, but are there any free alternatives?


    • Related Answers
  • e100

    Personally, I've used Fontlab's TypeTool. It's not free but less than $100, which is significantly cheaper than their recently revived Fontographer or their professional industry standard FontLab Studio.

    If you want free, there's FontForge, but you need to use Cygwin (or a Linux VM) to get it to work under Windows.

    All of those will allow you to start by importing your bitmap images for manual tracing. If you're looking for something more automatic, you could use another app such as Illustrator or Inkscape to automate tracing and import the resulting vectors into the font app as a starting point.

  • William Hilsum

    I have been using Fontstruct recently. Online, Free, Works great!

  • boost

    Fontographer is good. Other than that there are font tools in TeX, but that's not for the faint-hearted.

  • Journeyman Geek

    Took a look at fontforge? I vaguely remember a java based one i was playing with ages ago as well, but i can't for the life of me remember what it was called.