Ubuntu Fonts..

A couple of weeks ago, I was messing with the Gimp & Inkscape trying to come up with a better header for the site. I started to realise that I needed much better fonts than the one’s that come installed by default.

I was going to write up a quick tutorial on installing some of the better fonts, but Carthik from Ubuntu Blog beat me to it. Check out his blog called 300+ Easily Installed Free Fonts

I might as well add some of the other info that I collected while reading up on fonts though..

Mark Shuttleworth has just wrote a new article highlighting some of the current problems with fonts in the Linux world. Head over to here if you want a read.

Redhat have just released some new fonts, that have been designed to replace the 3 most commonly used Microsoft fonts.. Times New Roman®, Arial® and Courier New®. This is great news as Microsoft refuses to allow others to license or distribute these fonts, which stops people from using them to create truly open documents.

A lot of web sites still use these fonts too, which can cause trouble for Linux users, who are forced to download & install the official fonts before they can view the web sites. The legality of this is very worrying & this stops these fonts from being installed on any Linux distribution as standard.

You can check out the full news story here & download an unofficial Ubuntu package from Dave Walkers blog here.

Hint: If you want to install the official Ubuntu Logo font, then open up a terminal & enter..

sudo apt-get install ttf-ubuntu-title

You should then be able to use this font from any of your programs. Unfortunately though this is only a lower case font & won’t allow the use of capital letters.

That should be enough coverage of fonts for now I think

p.s. If your looking for some software to view & compare different fonts, then check out my post here!