Installing fonts

One may install Linux user fonts using a variety of methods. They can be made available systemwide, to be accessible to core GUI resources such as KDE or GNOME. More commonly, users only install fonts so they can be used by product-making applications including Inkscape and OpenOffice.org.

Inkscape's way of installing fonts is hardly any different than the installing of fonts on any other program. Essentially, one has to download whatever fonts he would like and place them in the default font directory. Truetype fonts are installed by placement of the files into the /usr/share/fonts/ttf directory (or C:\WINDOWS\FONTS for Windows types).

- mv ~/downloads/*.ttf /usr/share/fonts/ttf

It is advisable that the font cache file be deleted in the process. This file is fonts.cache-1, located in /usr/share/fonts (or C:\WINDOWS\FONTS for Windows types). After font files have been transferred to the default font directory, delete this fonts.cache-1 file and the .fonts.cache-1 file in your home directory (or "My Documents" directory for Windows types).

- rm -f /usr/share/fonts/*fonts.cache-1
- rm -f ~/*fonts.cache-1

Once done doing this, you need to rebuild your font cache files (only if you are using Linux or some other OS for which font caches are used) so other programs can effectively use the fonts. Do this by going to your default font directory (/usr/share/fonts) and typing as root:

- fc-cache