HOW-TO: install ttf fonts in #! for newbies!

GhostSinger · 2010-08-30 15:41:05

I just figured out how to add ttf fonts to #! and i thought other newbies like me would be interested in learning how to add extra fonts to #!, so i decided to share!
well without much ado,
1. Go to your home directory, either through file manager or just open a terminal.
2. Create a folder called "fonts".
if you are on a terminal, type:

mkdir fonts

3. Download the fonts that you need and move them to your newly created "fonts" folder.
4. Go to your new folder "fonts", and open up a terminal there or if your first terminal is still open, type:

cd fonts

5. Now , you have to move your .ttf fonts in your "fonts" folder to the actual folder where the fonts are located. In your terminal, type:

mv *.ttf /usr/share/fonts/truetype

(note: 1. this method is for truetype fonts.
2. * denotes the name of your font, for example, Arial.ttf)
6. Now, you have to go to /usr/share/fonts/truetype. In your terminal, type:

cd /usr/share/fonts/truetype

7. Now you need to create fonts.scale and fonts.dir. Type the following commands in your terminal:

mkfontscale
mkfontdir
fc-cache

8. Now, you have to make sure your crunchbang system finds the file. So, in your terminal type:

xset fp rehash

9. Now to make sure you have your font installed, open Abiword Word Processor and check to see if your font is done.

Tips:
1. Use "sudo" if command is not working.
2. Make sure you are in the correct directories while typing out commands.
3. Use the same terminal, you opened up in the beginning and follow commands properly.
4. When you download fonts in a archived package, make sure you transfer all the files ending with .ttf before doing anything.
Sources:
From where i learnt how to install .ttf fonts-->
1. http://vietunicode.sourceforge.net/howto/fontlinux.html
2. http://www.bigwebmaster.com/General/How … fonts.html

If there are any mistakes or if there is a better way please post and tell me!!
Hope this is useful and saves you a lot of time!
Have fun #!ing! smile
Note: Oh! i keep shortening my words like you to "u". Sorry about that!

Last edited by GhostSinger (2010-08-30 16:27:09)

FiniteStateMachine · 2010-08-30 16:14:59

You can just place your fonts in the .fonts folder (its hidden, and in your home directory, you need to have the file manager set to show hidden files to see it).

luc · 2010-08-30 16:19:57

you can leave out the red line:
$cd ..
$cd /usr/share/fonts/truetype
because the blue one does the whole job

the dollar sign in the beginning of each line might be irritating, as it must not be typed.
you are putting 'notes' about sudo everywhere. why not say a word about it in the beginning and not scattered all over the place.

lastly this forum provides a special 'code' tag. you can click on the symbol above the typing field (second from right). it produces two tags between which you can put your text.

It appears like this

cheers
luc

GhostSinger · 2010-08-30 16:30:11

FiniteStateMachine wrote:

You can just place your fonts in the .fonts folder (its hidden, and in your home directory, you need to have the file manager set to show hidden files to see it).

That is indeed simple! Can you tell me how to enable filemanager to view hidden files?

@luc, Thank you for your feedback!! smile edited accordingly!

kukibird1 · 2010-08-30 16:32:22

GhostSinger wrote:

FiniteStateMachine wrote:
You can just place your fonts in the .fonts folder (its hidden, and in your home directory, you need to have the file manager set to show hidden files to see it).
That is indeed simple! Can you tell me how to enable filemanager to view hidden files?
@luc, Thank you for your feedback!! edited accordingly!

View> Show Hidden Files or Control+h in your file manager. If you just want downloaded fonts for your own personal use just move them to ~/.fonts then logout/login or run fc-cache -fv.

Last edited by kukibird1 (2010-08-30 16:49:20)

FiniteStateMachine · 2010-08-30 17:14:55

yea, i forgot to mention you still need to

 fc-cache -fv

after you put fonts in that folder.

kukibird1 · 2010-08-30 17:41:18

Also for personal use icons/cursors can go in ~/.icons and themes can go in ~/themes. These folders can be created if they are not already.

GhostSinger · 2010-08-31 14:15:52

Thanks FSM and kukibird1 !! smile

vvim · 2011-02-21 15:55:47

Thank you! I just used it today to get the Japanese font of Mnemosyne right!

rizzo · 2011-02-21 20:39:00

I usually just copy them into a folder (with thunar, I'm lazy smile ) in /usr/share/fonts (I prefer them available system wide), then run

sudo fc-cache -f -v

simple smile

ali · 2011-02-21 20:58:23

what i do when installing new fonts is create a new dir in /usr/share/fonts and i put everything in /usr/share/fonts/ali so i know i don't mess up anything that way i know that those files are safe to remove without side effects

pjbrunet · 2012-06-26 17:34:03

I'm having trouble with this. I moved the .ttf file to .fonts and ran 'fc-cache -fv' and my apps can't find the font. I tried restarting the apps. Any idea why it's not working?

Also when I run fc-cache it shows "/home/pj/.fonts: caching, new cache contents: 2 fonts, 0 dirs"

Last edited by pjbrunet (2012-06-26 17:37:34)

el_koraco · 2012-06-26 17:47:37

Log out and back in.

pjbrunet · 2012-06-26 17:53:21

el_koraco wrote:

Log out and back in.

That didn't work either. I also tried rebooting. Maybe there's an app that will figure this out for me?

---

pj@Dasher:~/.fonts$ fc-cache -fv
/usr/share/fonts: caching, new cache contents: 0 fonts, 3 dirs
/usr/share/fonts/X11: caching, new cache contents: 0 fonts, 6 dirs
/usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi: caching, new cache contents: 0 fonts, 0 dirs
/usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi: caching, new cache contents: 0 fonts, 0 dirs
/usr/share/fonts/X11/Type1: caching, new cache contents: 44 fonts, 0 dirs
/usr/share/fonts/X11/encodings: caching, new cache contents: 0 fonts, 1 dirs
/usr/share/fonts/X11/encodings/large: caching, new cache contents: 0 fonts, 0 dirs
/usr/share/fonts/X11/misc: caching, new cache contents: 0 fonts, 0 dirs
/usr/share/fonts/X11/util: caching, new cache contents: 0 fonts, 0 dirs
/usr/share/fonts/truetype: caching, new cache contents: 0 fonts, 8 dirs
/usr/share/fonts/truetype/freefont: caching, new cache contents: 12 fonts, 0 dirs
/usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts: caching, new cache contents: 60 fonts, 0 dirs
/usr/share/fonts/truetype/openoffice: caching, new cache contents: 1 fonts, 0 dirs
/usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-dejavu: caching, new cache contents: 21 fonts, 0 dirs
/usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-liberation: caching, new cache contents: 12 fonts, 0 dirs
/usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-lyx: caching, new cache contents: 9 fonts, 0 dirs
/usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-sil-gentium: caching, new cache contents: 4 fonts, 0 dirs
/usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-sil-gentium-basic: caching, new cache contents: 8 fonts, 0 dirs
/usr/share/fonts/type1: caching, new cache contents: 0 fonts, 2 dirs
/usr/share/fonts/type1/gsfonts: caching, new cache contents: 35 fonts, 0 dirs
/usr/share/fonts/type1/mathml: caching, new cache contents: 1 fonts, 0 dirs
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts: skipping, no such directory
/usr/local/share/fonts: caching, new cache contents: 0 fonts, 0 dirs
/home/pj/.fonts: caching, new cache contents: 2 fonts, 0 dirs
/var/cache/fontconfig: not cleaning unwritable cache directory
/home/pj/.fontconfig: cleaning cache directory
fc-cache: succeeded
pj@Dasher:~/.fonts$

el_koraco · 2012-06-26 17:59:33

Which apps can't find the font?

pjbrunet · 2012-06-26 21:33:58

el_koraco wrote:

Which apps can't find the font?

I tried Abiword and GIMP.

el_koraco · 2012-06-26 21:54:03

Can you give me a link to the font so I can try it myself?

pjbrunet · 2012-06-27 02:06:03

el_koraco wrote:

Can you give me a link to the font so I can try it myself?

There's no link. I'm paying an artist a percentage of the job to use this font, it's a custom font from her typographer friend. So I can't really share it. It works in Windows! Haha.

---

Update: I opened the font in fontmatrix and turns out that wasn't the font I wanted. Probably nobody cares but I'll post the solution if/when I figure this out.

Last edited by pjbrunet (2012-06-27 06:16:20)

gutterslob · 2012-06-27 03:48:10

^ if that's the case, then there's not much we can do for you. Technically, if it is indeed a correctly encoded .ttf (as opposed to .fon or whatever they use on windows), then all you need to do is move it to your ~/.fonts folder and log out and back in. You don't even need to renew your font cache.

try

fc-list | grep ttf

....in your terminal and it should list all the ttf fonts installed on your system. See if you can locate your font.

pjbrunet · 2012-06-27 19:50:36

gutterslob wrote:

^ if that's the case, then there's not much we can do for you. Technically, if it is indeed a correctly encoded .ttf (as opposed to .fon or whatever they use on windows), then all you need to do is move it to your ~/.fonts folder and log out and back in. You don't even need to renew your font cache.
try
fc-list | grep ttf
....in your terminal and it should list all the ttf fonts installed on your system. See if you can locate your font.

OK thanks for all the suggestions. I was able to add another font no problem, just moving it to .fonts and logging back in. So there must be something odd about the particular .ttf the artist gave me.

Turns out the font I actually need works fine, problem solved.

...

After some more digging here, turns out the "broken" font was actually added to my system under another name that didn't match the filename. I suspected that might be the issue but browsing through the fonts I somehow missed it. Yes I did check fc-list, but I didn't use the "-v" switch. So just now I piped fc-list verbose to a file and opened the file and that's how I found the "fullname" and "family" of the "broken" font was actually in my system as EmptyFont:

Pattern has 19 elts (size 32)
family: "EmptyFont"(s)
familylang: "en"(s)
style: "Regular"(s)
stylelang: "en"(s)
fullname: "EmptyFont"(s)
fullnamelang: "en"(s)
slant: 0(i)(s)
weight: 80(i)(s)
width: 100(i)(s)
foundry: "unknown"(s)
file: "/home/pj/.fonts/covling.ttf"(s)
index: 0(i)(s)
outline: FcTrue(s)
scalable: FcTrue(s)
charset:
0000: 00000000 ffffffff ffffffff 7fffffff 00000000 00000001 00000000 00000000
(s)
lang: fj|ho|ia|ie|io|nr|om|so|ss|st|sw|ts|uz|xh|zu|kj|kwm|ms|ng|rn|rw|sn|za(s)
fontversion: 65536(i)(s)
fontformat: "TrueType"(s)
decorative: FcFalse(s)

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#1 2010-08-30 15:41:05

HOW-TO: install ttf fonts in #! for newbies!

#2 2010-08-30 16:14:59

Re: HOW-TO: install ttf fonts in #! for newbies!

#3 2010-08-30 16:19:57

Re: HOW-TO: install ttf fonts in #! for newbies!

#4 2010-08-30 16:30:11

Re: HOW-TO: install ttf fonts in #! for newbies!

#5 2010-08-30 16:32:22

Re: HOW-TO: install ttf fonts in #! for newbies!

#6 2010-08-30 17:14:55

Re: HOW-TO: install ttf fonts in #! for newbies!

#7 2010-08-30 17:41:18

Re: HOW-TO: install ttf fonts in #! for newbies!

#8 2010-08-31 14:15:52

Re: HOW-TO: install ttf fonts in #! for newbies!

#9 2011-02-21 15:55:47

Re: HOW-TO: install ttf fonts in #! for newbies!

#10 2011-02-21 20:39:00

Re: HOW-TO: install ttf fonts in #! for newbies!

#11 2011-02-21 20:58:23

Re: HOW-TO: install ttf fonts in #! for newbies!

#12 2012-06-26 17:34:03

Re: HOW-TO: install ttf fonts in #! for newbies!

#13 2012-06-26 17:47:37

Re: HOW-TO: install ttf fonts in #! for newbies!

#14 2012-06-26 17:53:21

Re: HOW-TO: install ttf fonts in #! for newbies!

#15 2012-06-26 17:59:33

Re: HOW-TO: install ttf fonts in #! for newbies!

#16 2012-06-26 21:33:58

Re: HOW-TO: install ttf fonts in #! for newbies!

#17 2012-06-26 21:54:03

Re: HOW-TO: install ttf fonts in #! for newbies!

#18 2012-06-27 02:06:03

Re: HOW-TO: install ttf fonts in #! for newbies!

#19 2012-06-27 03:48:10

Re: HOW-TO: install ttf fonts in #! for newbies!

#20 2012-06-27 19:50:36

Re: HOW-TO: install ttf fonts in #! for newbies!

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