Find fonts on linux

Fonts

From Wikipedia:Computer font: «A computer font (or font) is an electronic data file containing a set of glyphs, characters, or symbols such as dingbats.»

Note that certain font licenses may impose some legal limitations.

Contents

Font formats

Most computer fonts used today are in either bitmap or outline data formats.

Bitmap fonts Consist of a matrix of dots or pixels representing the image of each glyph in each face and size. Outline or vector fonts Use Bézier curves, drawing instructions and mathematical formulae to describe each glyph, which make the character outlines scalable to any size.

Bitmap formats

• Bitmap Distribution Format (BDF) by Adobe
• Portable Compiled Format (PCF) by Xorg
• PC Screen Font (PSF) used by the Kernel for console fonts, not supported by Xorg (for Unicode PSF files the extension is psfu )

These formats can also be gzipped. See #Bitmap for the available bitmap fonts.

Outline formats

• PostScript fonts by Adobe – has various formats, e.g: Printer Font ASCII (PFA) and Printer Font Binary (PFB)
• TrueType by Apple and Microsoft (file extension: ttf )
• OpenType by Microsoft, built on TrueType (file extensions: otf , ttf )

For most purposes, the technical differences between TrueType and OpenType can be ignored.

Other formats

The typesetting application TeX and its companion font software, Metafont, traditionally renders characters using its own methods. Some file extensions used for fonts from these two programs are *pk , *gf , mf and vf . Modern versions can also use TrueType and OpenType fonts.

FontForge ( fontforge ), a font editing application, can store fonts in its native text-based format, sfd , spline font database.

The SVG format also has its own font description method.

Installation

There are various methods for installing fonts.

Pacman

Fonts and font collections in the enabled repositories can be installed using pacman.

Available fonts may be found by querying packages (e.g. for font or ttf ).

Creating a package

You should give pacman the ability to manage your fonts, which is done by creating an Arch package. These can also be shared with the community in the AUR. The packages to install fonts are particularly similar; see Font packaging guidelines.

The family name of a font file can be aquired with the use of fc-query for example: fc-query -f ‘%\n’ /path/to/file . The formatting is described in FcPatternFormat(3) .

Manual installation

The recommended way of adding fonts that are not in the repositories to your system is described in #Creating a package. This gives pacman the ability to remove or update them at a later time.

Alternatively, fonts can be installed manually:

For a single user, install fonts to

/.local/share/fonts/ .

• In many cases this suffices, unless you run graphical applications as other users.
• In the past

/.fonts/ was used, but is now deprecated.

For system-wide (all users) installation, place your fonts under /usr/local/share/fonts/ .

• You may need to create the directory first; mkdir -p /usr/local/share/fonts .
• /usr/share/fonts/ is under the purview of the package manager, and shouldn’t be modified manually.

The creation of a subdirectory structure is up to the user, and varies among Linux distributions. For clarity, it’s good to keep each font in its own directory. Fontconfig will search its default paths recursively, ensuring nested files get picked up.

An example structure might be:

The font files need to have sufficient read permissions for all users, i.e. at least chmod 444 for files, and 555 for directories.

For the Xserver to load fonts directly (as opposed to the use of a font server), the directory for your newly added font must be added with a FontPath entry. This entry is located in the Files section of your Xorg configuration file (e.g. /etc/X11/xorg.conf or /etc/xorg.conf ). See #Older applications for more detail.

Finally, update the fontconfig cache (usually unnecessary as software using the fontconfig library does this):

Older applications

With older applications that do not support fontconfig (e.g. GTK 1.x applications, and xfontsel ) the index will need to be created in the font directory:

Or to include more than one folder with one command:

Or if fonts were installed in a different sub-folders under the e.g. /usr/share/fonts :

At times the X server may fail to load the fonts directory and you will need to rescan all the fonts.dir files:

To check that the font(s) is included:

This can also be set globally in /etc/X11/xorg.conf or /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d .

Here is an example of the section that must be added to /etc/X11/xorg.conf . Add or remove paths based on your particular font requirements.

Pango Warnings

When Pango is in use on your system it will read from fontconfig to sort out where to source fonts.

If you are seeing errors similar to this and/or seeing blocks instead of characters in your application then you need to add fonts and update the font cache. This example uses the ttf-liberation fonts to illustrate the solution (after successful installation of the package) and runs as root to enable them system-wide.

You can test for a default font being set like so:

Font packages

This is a selective list that includes many font packages from the AUR along with those in the official repositories. Fonts are tagged «Unicode» if they have wide Unicode support.

Bitmap

• Default 8×16
• Berry ( pcf-spectrum-berryAUR ) — 8px
• Dina ( dina-font ) – 6pt, 8pt, 9pt, 10pt, monospaced, based on Proggy
• Efont ( efont-unicode-bdfAUR ) – 10px, 12px, 14px, 16px, 24px, normal, bold and italic
• Gohu ( gohufontAUR ) – 11px, 14px, normal and bold
• Lime ( artwiz-fontsAUR )
• ProFont ( ttf-profont-iixAUR ) – 10px, 11px, 12px, 15px, 17px, 22px, 29px, normal
• Proggy ( proggyfontsAUR ) – has different variants
• Tamsyn ( tamsyn-font )
• Terminus ( terminus-font )
• Tewi ( bdf-tewi-gitAUR )
• Unifont (most extensive Unicode coverage of any font) ( bdf-unifont )

Works with pango 1.44:

Latin script

Families

• Bitstream Vera ( ttf-bitstream-vera ) – serif, sans-serif, and monospace
• Croscore fonts ( ttf-croscore ) – Chrome OS’ substitute for Windows’ Arial, Times New Roman, and Courier New using the same metric
• DejaVu fonts ( ttf-dejavu ) – Bitstream Vera modified for greater Unicode coverage
• Droid ( ttf-droid ) – default font for older Android versions with wide Unicode coverage including CJK but not symbols and emojis
• GNU FreeFont ( gnu-free-fonts ) – free sans, sans serif and monospace fonts in the OpenType scalable format, good Unicode coverage however does not include CJK
• IBM Plex ( ttf-ibm-plex ) – serif, sans-serif, condensed sans-serif and monospace with true italics
• Liberation fonts ( ttf-liberation ) – free metric-compatible substitute for the Arial, Arial Narrow, Times New Roman and Courier New fonts found in Windows and Microsoft Office products
• Linux Libertine ( ttf-linux-libertine ) – serif (Libertine) and sans serif (Biolinum) fonts with large Unicode coverage
• Microsoft fonts ( ttf-ms-win10AUR ) – Windows 10 fonts (Windows 10 installation or installation medium needed)
• Noto fonts ( noto-fonts ) – Google font family with full Unicode coverage if installed with its emoji and CJK optional dependencies

Packages not providing a base font set:

• B612 ( ttf-b612AUR ) – open source font family (sans and mono) sponsored by Airbus, designed for comfort of reading on aircraft cockpit screens
• Luxi fonts ( font-bh-ttfAUR ) – X.Org font family similar to Lucida
• Roboto ( ttf-roboto ) – default font for newer Android versions where it is complemented by Noto fonts for languages not supported like CJK
• TeX Gyre fonts ( tex-gyre-fonts ) – free substitute for Helvetica, Times New Roman, Palatino, Bookman and other popular fonts by the Polish GUST association of TeX users
• Ubuntu font family ( ttf-ubuntu-font-family )

Legacy Microsoft font packages:

• Microsoft fonts ( ttf-ms-fontsAUR ) – Andalé Mono, Courier New, Arial, Arial Black, Comic Sans, Impact, Lucida Sans, Microsoft Sans Serif, Trebuchet, Verdana, Georgia, Times New Roman
• Vista fonts ( ttf-vista-fontsAUR ) – Consolas, Calibri, Candara, Corbel, Cambria, Constantia

Monospaced

Fonts supporting programming ligatures are identified below with a ⟶ sign. For more monospaced fonts, also see #Bitmap and #Families.

• Anonymous Pro ( ttf-anonymous-pro , included in ttf-google-fonts-gitAUR )
• Cascadia Code ( ttf-cascadia-code ) ⟶ – designed to enhance the look of the Windows Terminal, with programming ligatures, released by Microsoft under the Open Font License.
• Courier Prime ( ttf-courier-primeAUR ) – Courier alternative which has been supplemented by a sans serif font and a version optimized for programming, released under the Open Font License.
• Envy Code R ( ttf-envy-code-rAUR ) – font designed for programmers
• Fantasque Sans Mono ( ttf-fantasque-sans-mono , otf-fantasque-sans-mono )
• Fira Mono ( ttf-fira-mono , otf-fira-mono ) – font optimized for small screens and adopted by Mozilla for the Firefox OS
• Fira Code ( ttf-fira-code ) ⟶ – extension of Fira Mono with programming ligatures for common programming multi-character combinations
• Hack ( ttf-hack ) — an open source monospaced font, used as the default in KDE Plasma
• Hermit ( otf-hermit ) — a font for programmers, by a programmer
• Inconsolata ( ttf-inconsolata , included in ttf-google-fonts-gitAUR ) – designed for source code listing, inspired by Consolas and Letter Gothic
• Inconsolata-g ( ttf-inconsolata-gAUR ) – adds some programmer-friendly modifications
• Iosevka ( ttc-iosevka ) ⟶ – slender sans-serif and slab-serif typeface inspired by Pragmata Pro, M+ and PF DIN Mono, designed to be the ideal font for programming; it supports programming ligatures and over 2000 latin, greek, cyrillic, phonetic and PowerLine glyphs
• JetBrains Mono ( ttf-jetbrains-mono ) ⟶ – the free and open-source typeface for developers
• Lucida Typewriter (included in package jreAUR )
• Menlo ( ttf-mesloAUR ) – customized version of Apple’s Menlo Regular font for OS X with larger vertical gap spacing
• Monaco ( ttf-monacoAUR ) – proprietary font designed by Apple for OS X
• Monofur ( ttf-monofur )
• Mononoki ( ttf-mononokiAUR ) – a font for programming and code review
• Source Code Pro ( adobe-source-code-pro-fonts , included in ttf-google-fonts-gitAUR )

Sans-serif

• Andika ( ttf-andikaAUR )
• Cantarell ( cantarell-fonts ) – default font supplied with GNOME, it is required by the GNOME and GTK 3 related packages
• DMCA Sans Serif ( ttf-dmcasansserifAUR ) – General purpose sans serif font metric-compatible with Microsoft Consolas
• FreeSans ( gnu-free-fonts ) – Unicode
• Inter UI ( inter-font ) – designed for user interfaces
• Jost* ( otf-jostAUR ) — An open-source typeface based on Futura
• Open Sans ( ttf-opensans ) – sans serif font commissioned by Google, based on Droid sans but slightly wider.
• PT Sans ( ttf-google-fonts-gitAUR ) – 3 major variations: normal, narrow, and caption — Unicode: Latin, Cyrillic
• Source Sans ( adobe-source-sans-fonts ) – open source sans serif font from Adobe with a design based on News Gothic and Franklin Gothic
• Tahoma ( ttf-tahomaAUR )

Serif

• Bodoni* ( otf-bodoniAUR ) — An open-source Bodoni revival
• EB Garamond ( ebgaramond-otfAUR ) — An open-source Garamond revival
• FreeSerif ( gnu-free-fonts ) — Unicode
• Gentium ( gentium-plus-font ) — Unicode: Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Phonetic Alphabet
• Linux Libertine ( ttf-linux-libertine ) — Unicode: Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew

Unsorted

This article or section needs language, wiki syntax or style improvements. See Help:Style for reference.

• ttf-cheapskateAUR — Font collection from dustismo.com
• ttf-junicode — Junius font containing almost complete medieval latin script glyphs
• ttf-mph-2b-damaseAUR — Covers full plane 1 and several scripts
• xorg-fonts-type1 — IBM Courier and Adobe Utopia sets of PostScript fonts
• all-repository-fontsAUR — Meta package for all fonts in the official repositories.
• ttf-google-fonts-gitAUR — a huge collection of free fonts (including Ubuntu, Inconsolata, Roboto, etc.) — Note: Your font dialog might get very long as >100 fonts will be added.

Non-latin scripts

Ancient Scripts

• ttf-ancient-fontsAUR — Font containing Unicode symbols for Aegean, Egyptian, Cuneiform, Anatolian, Maya, and Analecta scripts

Arabic

• ttf-amiriAUR — A classical Arabic typeface in Naskh style poineered by Amiria Press
• ttf-arabeyes-fontsAUR — Collection of free Arabic fonts
• ttf-qurancomplex-fontsAUR — Fonts by King Fahd Glorious Quran Printing Complex in al-Madinah al-Munawwarah
• ttf-sil-lateefAUR — Unicode Arabic font from SIL
• ttf-sil-scheherazadeAUR — Unicode Arabic font from SIL (Alternative for Traditional Arabic font)

Bengali

Braille

• ttf-ubrailleAUR — Font containing Unicode symbols for braille

Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese

Pan-CJK

• Adobe Source Han fonts — Large collection of fonts which comprehensively support Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, with a consistent design and look.
  • adobe-source-han-sans-otc-fonts — Sans fonts
  • adobe-source-han-serif-otc-fonts — Serif fonts
• noto-fonts-cjk — Large collection of fonts which comprehensively support Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, with a consistent design and look. It is currently a rebadged version of adobe-source-han-sans-otc-fonts .

Chinese

Japanese

Korean

Vietnamese

• ttf-hannom — Vietnamese TrueType font for chữ Nôm characters

Cyrillic

• ttf-paratypeAUR — Font family by ParaType: sans, serif, mono, extended cyrillic and latin, OFL license
• otf-russkopisAUR — A free OpenType cursive font for Cyrillic script

Greek

Almost all Unicode fonts contain the Greek character set (polytonic included). Some additional font packages, which might not contain the complete Unicode set but utilize high quality Greek (and Latin, of course) typefaces are:

• otf-gfsAUR — Selection of OpenType fonts from the Greek Font Society
• ttf-mgopenAUR — Professional TrueType fonts from Magenta

Hebrew

• opensiddur-hebrew-fontsAUR — Large collection of Open-source licensed Hebrew fonts. There are also few Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, and Amharic.
• culmusAUR — Nice collection of free Hebrew fonts.
• alefbetAUR — 2 Hebrew fonts (at the moment): the commonly used «David Libre», and the handwriting font «Gveret Levin».
• ttf-ms-fontsAUR — contains Arial and other fonts.

Indic

Khmer

• ttf-khmer — Font covering glyphs for Khmer language
• Hanuman ( ttf-google-fonts-gitAUR )

Mongolic and Tungusic

• ttf-abkaiAUR — Fonts for Sibe, Manchu and Daur scripts (incomplete, currently in development)

Persian

• persian-fontsAUR — Meta package for installing all Persian fonts in AUR.
• borna-fontsAUR — Borna Rayaneh Co. Persian B font series.
• iran-nastaliq-fontsAUR — A free Unicode calligraphic Persian font.
• iranian-fontsAUR — Iranian-Sans and Iranian-Serif Persian font family.
• ir-standard-fontsAUR — Iran Supreme Council of Information and Communication Technology (SCICT) standard Persian fonts.
• persian-hm-ftx-fontsAUR — A Persian font series derived from X Series 2, Metafont and FarsiTeX fonts with Kashida feature.
• persian-hm-xs2-fontsAUR — A Persian font series derived from X Series 2 fonts with Kashida feature.
• gandom-fontsAUR , parastoo-fontsAUR , sahel-fontsAUR , samim-fontsAUR , shabnam-fontsAUR , tanha-fontsAUR , vazir-fontsAUR , vazir-code-fontsAUR — Beautiful Persian fonts made by Saber RastiKerdar.
• ttf-yasAUR — The Yas Persian font series (with hollow zero).
• ttf-x2AUR — Free fonts with support for Persian, Arabic, Urdu, Pashto, Dari, Uzbek, Kurdish, Uighur, old Turkish (Ottoman) and modern Turkish (Roman).

Tai–Kadai

• fonts-tlwgAUR — Collection of scalable Thai fonts
• ttf-laoAUR — Lao TTF font (Phetsarath_OT)
• ttf-lao-fontsAUR — Lao TTF fonts, both Unicode and non-Unicode for Windows

Tibeto-Burman

• ttf-tibetan-machine — Tibetan Machine TTFont
• ttf-myanmar-fontsAUR — 121 Fonts from myordbok.com

Emoji and symbols

A section of the Unicode standard is designated for pictographic characters called «emoji».

Emoji fonts come in different formats: CBDT/CBLC (Google), SBIX (Apple), COLR/CPAL (Microsoft), SVG (Mozilla/Adobe).

Emojis should work without any configuration once you have at least one emoji font installed of supported format. Emoji font fallback according to the standard requires extra code to handle emoji. To force emoji font for specific application, see Font configuration#Force emoji font.

Software	CBDT/CBLC	SBIX	COLR/CPAL	SVG	Emoji font fallback
Freetype	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	–
Pango	Freetype				Yes
WebKitGTK	Freetype				Yes
Qt	Freetype				No [1] [2] [3]
Chromium	Freetype				Yes
Firefox	Freetype			Yes	No, see Firefox#Font troubleshooting for workaround.

• noto-fonts-emoji — Google’s open-source Emoji 13.1.
• ttf-joypixels — EmojiOne creator’s proprietary Emoji 13.1.
• ttf-twemojiAUR — Twitter’s open-source Emoji 13.0.

• otf-openmojiAUR — German University of Design in Schwäbisch Gmünd open-source Emoji 13.0.
• ttf-twemoji-colorAUR — Twitter’s open-source Emoji 13.0.

• ttf-symbolaAUR — provides many Unicode symbols, including emoji.

Kaomoji are sometimes referred to as «Japanese emoticons» and are composed of characters from various character sets, including CJK and Indic fonts. For example, the following set of packages covers most of existing kaomoji: gnu-free-fonts , ttf-arphic-uming , and ttf-indic-otf .

• texlive-core and texlive-fontsextra contain many math fonts such as Latin Modern Math and STIX Fonts. See TeX Live#Making fonts available to Fontconfig for configuration.
• otf-stixAUR — A standalone, more recent version of STIX
• otf-latin-modern , otf-latinmodern-math — Improved version of Computer Modern fonts as used in LaTeX
• ttf-cm-unicodeAUR , otf-cm-unicodeAUR — Computer Modern (of TeX fame)
• ttf-mathtypeAUR — MathType fonts
• tex-gyre-math-fontsAUR — TeX Gyre (TG) Math Fonts, which are math companions for tex-gyre-fonts

Other operating system fonts

• ttf-mac-fontsAUR — Apple MacOS TrueType fonts

See Metric-compatible fonts, which lists available alternatives for Microsoft fonts.

Fallback font order

Fontconfig automatically chooses a font that matches the current requirement. That is to say, if one is looking at a window containing English and Chinese for example, it will switch to another font for the Chinese text if the default one does not support it.

Fontconfig lets every user configure the order they want via $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/fontconfig/fonts.conf . If you want a particular Chinese font to be selected after your favorite Serif font, your file would look like this:

You can add a section for sans-serif and monospace as well. For more information, have a look at the fontconfig manual.

Font alias

There are several font aliases which represent other fonts in order that applications may use similar fonts. The most common aliases are: serif for a font of the serif type (e.g. DejaVu Serif); sans-serif for a font of the sans-serif type (e.g. DejaVu Sans); and monospace for a monospaced font (e.g. DejaVu Sans Mono). However, the fonts which these aliases represent may vary and the relationship is often not shown in font management tools, such as those found in KDE and other desktop environments.

To reverse an alias and find which font it is representing, run:

In this case, DejaVuSansMono.ttf is the font represented by the monospace alias.

Tips and tricks

List all installed fonts

You can use the following command to list all installed Fontconfig fonts that are available on your system.

List installed fonts for a particular language

Applications and browsers select and display fonts depending upon fontconfig preferences and available font glyph for Unicode text. To list installed fonts for a particular language, issue a command fc-list :lang=»two letter language code» . For instance, to list installed Arabic fonts or fonts supporting Arabic glyph:

List installed fonts for a particular Unicode character

To search for monospace fonts supporting a particular Unicode codepoint:

Set terminal font on-the-fly

This article or section needs expansion.

For terminal emulators that use X resources, e.g. xterm or rxvt-unicode, fonts can be set by using escape sequences. Specifically, echo -e «\033]710;$font\007» to change the normal font ( *font in

/.Xresources ), and replace 710 with 711 , 712 , and 713 to change the *boldFont , *italicFont , and *boldItalicFont , respectively.

$font uses the same syntax as in

/.Xresources and can be anything the terminal emulator will support. (Example: xft:dejavu sans mono:size=9 )

Application-specific font cache

Matplotlib ( python-matplotlib or python2-matplotlib AUR ) uses its own font cache, so after updating fonts, be sure to remove

/.sage/matplotlib-1.2.1/fontList.cache , etc. so it will regenerate its cache and find the new fonts [5].

BiDirectional text in terminal

Run BiCon ( bicon-git AUR ) in order to display correctly Arabic and Hebrew text inside the terminal.

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