Project 16C: Dual Booters: Installing Fonts from Your Windows Partition (Optional)

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Now that you’ve learned how to mount your Windows partition (Chapter 12), there’s no reason for you not to take advantage of the many fonts you have there just gathering dust. Transferring font files from your Windows system to your Linux partition for use in Fedora is fairly similar to the methods you just used in Projects 16A and 16B.

16C-1: Locating Your Windows Fonts

Regardless of which font installation method you will use to install your Windows fonts on Fedora, the first three steps in this process are the same:

Mount your Windows partition as explained in Chapter 12.
Open a new Terminal window.
Check the location of your Windows Fonts folder, and then in the Terminal window type cd followed by a space, followed by the Fonts folder path, and then press ENTER. Very likely, your Fonts folder path will be /mnt/windows/WINDOWS/Fonts, but it might be slightly different (/mnt/windows/windows/Fonts, for example) depending on the version of Windows you are using.

Depending on which font installation method you will be using, the next steps differ.

16C-2: Installing Windows Fonts Locally Using the Easy Method

To install your Windows fonts locally for use with the fontconfig font subsystem (and most of the applications on your system), follow these steps:

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Copy the font that you want to install to your .fonts folder by typing the following command and pressing ENTER: cp fontname.ttf ~/.fonts/

You should not be root when doing this. Be sure to replace fontname with the name of the font you want to install, and replace username with your username. If you want to go wild and copy all of the fonts in your Windows font directory (that’s a lot of fonts, mind you!), you can type *.ttf instead of fontname.ttf. Be sure that you have a space between cp and fontname.ttf and between fontname.ttf and ~/.fonts/.
Type fc-cache ~/.fonts/ and then press ENTER. The installation will then be complete. If you want to make these fonts available for use in OpenOffice.org applications, you will also need to follow the procedure outlined in 16A-7.

16C-3: Installing Windows Fonts Globally Using the Easy Method

To easily install your Windows fonts so that all users on your machine can use them, follow these steps:

In your Terminal become root, and then copy the font you want to the system font folder by typing the following command and pressing ENTER: cp fontname.ttf /usr/share/fonts/

Type cp *.ttf /usr/share/fonts/ instead and press ENTER if you want to install all of the fonts in your Windows font directory.
Type fc-cache /usr/share/fonts/ and then press ENTER, which will complete the installation process. Again, to make these fonts available for use in OpenOffice.org applications, you will now need to follow the procedure outlined in 16A-7.

16C-4: Installing Windows Fonts Using the X Method

If you would like to install your Windows fonts using the X method (for use with applications not handled by the fontconfig font subsystem, such as the GIMP) follow these steps:

In your Terminal become root, and then copy the font you want to the xsysfonts folder by typing the following command and pressing ENTER: cp fontname.ttf /usr/share/fonts/xsysfonts/

Type cp *.ttf /usr/share/fonts/xsysfonts/ instead and press ENTER if you want to install all of the fonts in your Windows font directory.
Type cd /usr/share/fonts/xsysfonts and press ENTER.
Type ttmkfdir > fonts.scale and press ENTER.
Type mkfontdir and press ENTER.

The fonts will be ready for use when you restart your system.

Windows Fonts for Non–Dual Booters

So what happens if you have a Linux-only setup, and consequently no Windows fonts, but you still have to deal with documents you receive that are written with Windows fonts? Well, fortunately you are in luck, because you can download and install the group of fonts known as Microsoft TrueType Core Fonts, which includes Arial, Times New Roman, Courier New, Comic Sans, and a few others. These fonts are actually packaged as Windows executable files (.exe), so you will also need to install a utility called cabextract in order to extract the fonts (the .ttf files) from the .exe files.

The cabextract utility can be downloaded and installed with Synaptic. Just type cabextract in the Find search box, and then follow the usual procedures that you learned in Chapter 10. To get the fonts, go to http://sourceforge.net/ projects/corefonts. On that page, scroll down until you get to the Latest File Releases section. There you should find three items: cabextract, corefonts, and the fonts. To proceed, click the Download link next to the fonts, which will take you to the download page, from which you can select the fonts you want. I would recommend installing at least Arial, Courier, and Times, because they are not only pretty standard fare out there in the computing world, but they also provide you with significant foreign language support, which could come in handy even if you don’t consciously care about such things.

Once the files are downloaded, use the newly installed cabextract to get to the fonts in those .exe files. To make it easy, it is probably best to first create a new folder inside your Home folder, call the new folder mscorefonts, and then drag all the .exe files you downloaded into that folder. Once you’ve done that, open a new Command Terminal window and do the following (you don’t have to be root to do any of this):

Type cd mscorefonts and press ENTER. This will take you into the mscorefonts folder.
Type cabextract *.exe and press ENTER. This will tell the newly installed cabextract program to extract the contents of all files ending in .exe within the mscorefonts folder.

If you look inside the mscorefonts folder, you should see the original .exe files, your new fonts (the .ttf files), and maybe even a file called fontinst.inf, which you can ignore. To install the fonts, just install the .ttf files by following the instructions earlier in this chapter for installing fonts using the easy method.

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