Fonts

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Covers the selection and installation of fonts on Arch Linux.
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This article is about adding fonts. For information about font configuration, please see: Font Configuration.

Contents

Font formats

Most computer fonts used today are in either bitmap or outline data formats. Bitmap fonts store fixed images for each glyph in each typeface and point size. Outline or vector fonts store characters as instructions for drawing each glyph's lines and curves. Outline fonts scale smoothly in size over a wide range.

Common font filename extensions include:

  • bdf and bdf.gz – bitmap fonts, bitmap distribution format and gzip compressed bdf
  • pcf and pcf.gz – bitmaps, portable compiled font and gzip compressed pcf
  • psf, psfu, psf.gz and psfu.gz – bitmaps, PC screen font, PC screen font Unicode and the gzipped versions
  • pfa and pfb – outline fonts, PostScript font ASCII and PostScript font binary. PostScript fonts carry built-in printer instructions.
  • ttf – outline, TrueType font. Originally designed as a replacement for the PostScript fonts.
  • otf – outline, OpenType font. TrueType with PostScript typographic instructions.

For most purposes, the technical differences between TrueType and OpenType can be ignored, some fonts with a ttf extension are actually OpenType fonts.

Other formats

The typesetting application, TeX, and its companion font software, Metafont, render characters using their own methods. Some of the file extensions used for fonts by these two programs are *pk, *gf, mf and vf.

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

Installation

Various methods of installing fonts.

Pacman

Fonts and font collections in the enabled repositories can be installed using pacman. Available fonts may be found by using:

# pacman -Ss font

Or to search for ttf fonts only:

# pacman -Ss ttf

Creating a package

If you want to give pacman the ability to manage your fonts, you can create an Arch package. These can also be shared with the community in the AUR. Here is an example of how to create a basic package. To learn more about building packages, read PKGBUILD.

pkgname=ttf-fontname
pkgver=1.0
pkgrel=1
depends=('fontconfig' 'xorg-font-utils')
pkgdesc="custom fonts"
source=(http://someurl.org/$pkgname.tar.bz2)
install=$pkgname.install

build()
{
  mkdir -p $startdir/pkg/usr/share/fonts/TTF
  cp $startdir/src/*.ttf $startdir/pkg/usr/share/fonts/TTF
}

This PKGBUILD assumes the fonts are TrueType. An install file (ttf-fontname.install) will also need to be created to update the font cache:

post_install()
{
  echo -n "Updating font cache... "
  fc-cache -f > /dev/null
  mkfontscale /usr/share/fonts/TTF /usr/share/fonts/Type1
  mkfontdir /usr/share/fonts/TTF /usr/share/fonts/Type1
  echo "done."
}
 
post_upgrade()
{
  post_install $1
}
 
op=$1
shift
 
$op $*

Manual installation

The recommended way of adding fonts to your system that are not in the repositories is described in #Creating a package. This gives pacman the ability to be able to remove or update them at a later time. Fonts can alternately be installed manually as well.

To install fonts system-wide (available for all users), move the folder to the /usr/share/fonts/ directory. To install fonts for only a single user, use ~/.fonts/ instead.

Then update the font cache:

$ fc-cache -vf

Older applications

With older applications (GTK1...) that do not support fontconfig (e.g. xfontsel) the index will need to be created in the font directory:

$ mkfontscale
$ mkfontdir

Or, to include more than one folder with one command:

$ for dir in /font/dir1/ /font/dir2/; do xset +fp $dir; done && xset fp rehash

Font packages

This is a selective list that includes many font packages from the AUR along with those in the official repositories.

Arabic


Braille


  • ttf-ubraille - Font containing Unicode symbols for braille

Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese


  • ttf-arphic-ukai - Kaiti (brush stroke) Unicode font (enabling anti-aliasing is suggested)
  • ttf-arphic-uming - Mingti (printed) Unicode font
  • ttf-fireflysung - New Sung font
  • wqy-zenhei - Hei Ti Style (sans-serif) Chinese Outline font embedded with bitmapped Song Ti.
  • wqy-bitmapfont - Bitmapped Song Ti (serif) Chinese font
  • ttf-hannom-usong - Song Ti quality TrueType fonts for Unicode Han and Nom (Chinese and Vietnamese) characters (AUR)
  • otf-ipafont - Japanese Gothic (san-serif) and Mincho (serif) font set; one of the highest quality open source fonts (AUR)
  • ttf-vlgothic - Japanese Gothic fonts. Default of Fedora-ja/Ubuntu-ja/Vine Linux (AUR)
  • ttf-ume - Japanese font set includes Gothic/Mincho and several weights (AUR)
  • ttf-aquafont - Handwritten fixed-width TrueType font (AUR)
  • ttf-baekmuk - Collection of Korean TrueType fonts (AUR)
  • ttf-alee - Set of free Hangul TrueType fonts (AUR)
  • ttf-unfonts-core - Un fonts (default Baekmuk fonts may be unsatisfactory) (AUR)

Cyrillic


See: Unicode below

Hebrew


  • culmus - Nice collection of free Hebrew fonts

Indic


Khmer


  • ttf-khmer - Font covering glyphs for Khmer language

Latin


  • font-bh-ttf - Xorg Luxi fonts
  • ttf-cheapskate - Font collection from dustismo.com
  • ttf-isabella - Calligraphic font based on the Isabella Breviary of 1497
  • ttf-junicode - Junius font containing almost complete medieval latin script glyphs
  • ttf-ms-fonts - Un-extracted fonts from Microsoft. Note: Trebuchet Bold, trebucbd.ttf, is missing from this package.
  • ttf-ms-fonts-lic - Cleaner alternative to the above (AUR)

Sinhala


Tamil


Thai


  • ttf-thai - Font covering glyphs for Thai

Programmer


Math


Unicode


Recommendations

Some recommendations for different types of uses.

International users

Chinese
wqy-zenhei (Hei Ti embedded with bitmapped Song Ti, also supporting Japanese (partial) and Korean characters), ttf-arphic-ukai (Kai Ti) , ttf-hannom-usong (Song Ti, supporting Vietnamese characters)
Japanese
otf-ipafont
Korean
ttf-baekmuk

Desktop Environments

Unneccessary:

Terminals

Here are some suggestions. Every user has their own preference, experiment to find one that suits you.

Console fonts

The console, meaning a terminal running with no X windows, uses the ASCII character set as the default. This font and the keymap used are easily changed.

A console font is limited to either 256 or 512 characters. The fonts are found in /usr/share/kbd/consolefonts/. Keymaps, the connection between the key pressed and the character used by the computer, are found in the subdirectories of /usr/share/kbd/keymaps/.

Previewing and testing

Unfortunately, no organized library of images is available to preview console fonts. The user can, however, use setfont to temporarily change the font and be able to consider its use as the default. The available glyphs or letters in the font can also be viewed as a table with the command showconsolefont.

If the newly changed font is not suitable, a return to the default font is done by issuing the command setfont without any arguments. If the console display is totally unreadable, this command will still work—the user just types in setfont while "working blind."

Note that setfont only works on the console currently being used. Any other consoles, active or inactive, remain unaffected.

Examples

Change the font. This example is distinctive:

$ setfont /usr/share/kbd/consolefonts/gr737b-9x16-medieval.psfu.gz

Or change the font to one with 512 glyphs and set the keymap to ISO 8859-5 using the -m option:

$ setfont /usr/share/kbd/consolefonts/LatArCyrHeb-16.psfu.gz -m 8859-5

Then issue commands that send text to the display, perhaps view a manpage and try vi or nano, and view the table of glyphs with the command, showconsolefont.

Return to the default font with,

$ setfont

Changing the default font

To change the default font, the CONSOLEFONT= and CONSOLEMAP= settings in /etc/rc.conf must be altered. Again, the fonts can be found in /usr/share/kbd/consolefonts/ directory and keymaps can be found in the subdirectories of /usr/share/kbd/keymaps/.

Examples

For displaying characters such as Č, ž, đ, or š, using the font lat2-16.psfu.gz:

CONSOLEFONT="lat2-16.psfu.gz"

Set the proper keymap, in this case:

CONSOLEMAP="8859-2"

To use the specified font in early userspace, that is, early in the bootup process, add the keymap hook to /etc/mkinitcpio.conf:

HOOKS="base udev autodetect pata scsi sata filesystems keymap"

Then rebuild the image:

# mkinitcpio -p kernel26
Note: The above steps must be repeated for each kernel if more than one kernel package is installed.

See: Mkinitcpio#Configuring the HOOKS

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