How to install Fonts on Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver Linux

Objective

The following article will explain how to install fonts on Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver Linux

Operating System and Software Versions

• Operating System: – Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver

Requirements

Privileged access to your Ubuntu System as root or via sudo command is required.

Conventions

• # – requires given linux commands to be executed with root privileges either directly as a root user or by use of sudo command
• $ – requires given linux commands to be executed as a regular non-privileged user

Other Versions of this Tutorial

Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa)

Instructions

This article will use Bitwise.ttf as a sample TrueType Font to be installed on Ubuntu 18.04 Desktop.

This font and many other fonts can be freely downloaded from the https://www.1001freefonts.com/ website.

Alternatively, you can use the bellow wget and unzip commands to download and store Bitwise.ttf into your Downloads directory:

$ wget -O ~/Downloads/bitwise.zip https://www.1001freefonts.com/d/8190/bitwise.zip
$ unzip -p ~/Downloads/bitwise.zip Bitwise.ttf > ~/Downloads/Bitwise.ttf
$ rm ~/Downloads/bitwise.zip

The Bitwise.ttf font should now be stored in your Downloads directory:

$ ls ~/Downloads/
Bitwise.ttf
$ file ~/Downloads/Bitwise.ttf 
/home/linuxconfig/Downloads/Bitwise.ttf: TrueType Font data, 10 tables, 1st "OS/2", 18 names, Macintosh, type 1 string, BitwiseRegular

Install Fonts using Font Manager

The first and recommended approach to installing fonts on Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver is by use of Font Manager. Let’s start by the Font Manager installation in case Font Manager is not already installed on your system.

Open up terminal and enter:

$ sudo apt update && sudo apt -y install font-manager

Once the installation of Font Manager is completed, start the font manager by searching the Start/Activities menu:

Search for the font keyword then click on Font Manager icon to start Font Manager.

Once in the Font Manager window click on + sign in order to install a new font.

Navigate to the directory containing the desired font you wish to install. Once selected, hit the Open button.

Your font should be now installed. Use the search box to locate your newly installed font by searching for its name.

Optionally, confirm the font installation by using any font selection capable application like for example LibreOffice – Writer.

Please note that when using Font Manager all new installed fonts are stored within the ~/.local/share/fonts/ user home directory. This means that the fonts will be accessible only to the user who actually performed the fonts installation.

Read the below section Manual system-wide font installation on how to perform the system-wide font installation.

Manual user-space font installation

It is also possible to install new fonts manually by storing any new fonts into the ~/.fonts directory located within the user home directory.

The font installation procedure is quite simple as all what needs to be done in order to install new fonts is to copy the actual font file into ~/.fonts:

$ mkdir ~/.fonts
$ cp ~/Downloads/Bitwise.ttf ~/.fonts

All done. If you need to sort your new installed fonts into a sub-directory feel free to do so. Any directory under ~/.fonts will be included recursively and fonts picked up by the system.

Manual system-wide font installation

To install fonts system-wide, thus to be available for any user on the system, simply use the cp command to copy the desired font file into the /usr/local/share/fonts directory or create a new directory with /usr/local/share/fonts if you wish to sort your installed fonts into a sub-directory.

The following linux command will install a new font file ~/Downloads/Bitwise.ttf into a new directory eg. /usr/local/share/fonts/sample:

$ sudo mkdir /usr/local/share/fonts/sample
$ sudo cp ~/Downloads/Bitwise.ttf /usr/local/share/fonts/sample/

All done. No further configuration is required.