How to install and change fonts in Ubuntu

Even if Ubuntu brings a bunch of fonts, those users, who work in any program for video/photo/text editing, always need extra fonts. Or you may be ordinary user who wants to make your workspace more beautiful or extraodrinary.

New, extra fonts you can download from many different sites, and here are some of them:

• dafont
• 1001 free fonts
• fonts.com

Download desired font(s) and extract downloaded archive. Now you need to move extracted folder to /usr/share/fonts as root. This can be accomplished through GUI or CLI. If you decide to do it through GUI, read my article about installing and changing new themes in Ubuntu.

CLI way

Open terminal and:

cd /to/folder/where/downloaded/font/archive/is

sudo mv FONT_FOLDER /usr/share/fonts/

I prefere to put .ttf  fonts in /usr/share/fonts/TTF folder and .otf  fonts in /usr/share/fonts/OTF folder, but it's not a rule. It is important, only, to put desired font files in /usr/share/fonts folder.

After that, no matter whether you did it through GUI or CLI, you'll need to refresh your new font cache if you want to use new fonts, and you'll want it. Well:

sudo fc-cache -f -v

New fonts are now available and you can use them in your work. To change default fonts in your system, open Unity Tweak Tool, search for Fonts section and set your favourite fonts.