Free fonts for your desktop computer

In this example, we want to add a number of free fonts to our desktop computer with the Ubuntu operating system.

There are numerous sites, that offer free fonts. We can recommend freefonts.dk, which offers thousands of TrueType fonts (TTF), that can be browsed, downloaded and used directly and free of charge.

We browse and download the fonts, that we want to add, into a specific directory. Each font is stored in a compressed file.

We decompress all the files, convert the filenames to lowercase, set permissions and isolate the TTF files in a clean directory.

cd Desktop/fonts
unzip \*.zip
find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -execdir rename 'y/A-Z/a-z/' '{}' \;
chmod 0777 *.ttf
mkdir ~/fonts
mv *.ttf ~/fonts/
cd ..
rm -rf fonts

Our font types are then transferred to the operating system and we confirm, that they are owned by root. An index of the new font types are created and the font informatation cache files are updated.

sudo mkdir /usr/share/fonts/truetype/opentech
sudo cp /home/opentech/ttf/*.ttf /usr/share/fonts/truetype/opentech/
ls -ld /usr/share/fonts/truetype/opentech/*.ttf
sudo mkfontdir /usr/share/fonts/truetype/opentech
sudo fc-cache

The operating system is booted to test, that the new font types are available after reboot.