Ade Malsasa Akbar contact
Senior author, Open Source enthusiast.
Wednesday, January 10, 2024 at 00:27

This tutorial will help you download and install fonts listed on the alternative fonts comparison table we published. It means you will practice visiting websites of respective fonts like Carlito's and Liberation's, downloading, extracting, viewing, installing and finally using them on your system. This is hoped to help you increase document compatibility using LibreOffice and beyond. Happy working!

Subscribe to UbuntuBuzz Telegram Channel to get article updates.

Font Installation Basics

See Font Management Guide.

 

Notes 

We publish this tutorial to honour Free Software Community people who have developed these alternative fonts to help us all. We say thank you to all contributors who made beautiful and useful font families like FreeFont, Liberation, Nimbus / URW, Carlito, Caladea etc. We also say thank you to GNU/linux distributions who have been distributed these fonts built-in especially Debian and Ubuntu.


1. FreeSans, FreeSerif, FreeMono

This font family is replacements to Arial, Times New Roman and Courier New


 

Ubuntu systems:

$ sudo apt-get install fonts-freefont-ttf
 

All operating systems:

  • Visit https://www.gnu.org/software/freefont.
  • Navigate to project page (downloads ...).
  • Navigate to Download (to the top).
  • Click a package file e.g.  freefont-otf-20080323.zip to download FreeFont.
  • Unzip the package file. 
  • You got multiple font files in .otf or .ttf format.
  • Install the fonts.


2. Liberation Sans, Serif, Mono

This font family is replacements to Arial, Times New Roman and Courier New


 

Ubuntu:

$ sudo apt-get install fonts-liberation

 

All:

  • Visit github.com/liberationfonts/liberation-fonts.
  • Navigate to project page (downloads ...).
  • Navigate to Releases (to the top).
  • Click a package file e.g. liberation-fonts-ttf-2.1.5.tar.gz to download Liberation Fonts.
  • Unzip the package file. 
  • You got multiple font files in .otf or .ttf format.
  • Install the fonts.



3. Nimbus Sans, Roman, Mono

This font family is replacements to Helvetica, Times New Roman and Courier New.


 

Ubuntu:

$ sudo apt-get install fonts-urw-base35

 

All operating systems: 

  • Visit github.com/ArtifexSoftware/urw-base35-fonts.
  • Navigate to Releases (to the right).
  • Click a package file e.g. Source code (zip) to download Nimbus Fonts.
  • Unzip the package file. 
  • You got multiple font files in .otf or .ttf format.
  • Install the fonts.


4. Caladea

This font is a replacement to Cambria



Ubuntu:

$ sudo apt-get install fonts-crosextra-caladea


All operating systems:

  • Visit fonts.google.com/specimen/Caladea.
  • Click Download Family (to the right).
  • You will download Caladea.zip.
  • Unzip the package file. 
  • You got multiple font files in .ttf format.
  • Install the fonts.


5. Carlito

This font is a replacement to Calibri

 


Ubuntu: 

$ sudo apt-get install fonts-crosextra-carlito


All: 

  • Visit fonts.google.com/specimen/Carlito.
  • Click Download Family (to the right).
  • You will download Carlito.zip.
  • Unzip the package file. 
  • You got multiple font files in .ttf format.
  • Install the fonts.


6. Comic Neue

This font is a replacement to Comic Sans



Ubuntu: 

$ sudo apt-get install fonts-comic-neue


All: 

  • Visit comicneue.com.
  • Click Download (to the top).
  • Click comic-neue-2.51.zip to download it.
  • Unzip the package file. 
  • You got multiple font files in .ttf format.
  • Install the fonts.


7. TeX Gyre Heros

This font is a replacement to Helvetica.  

 


Ubuntu:

$ sudo apt-get install fonts-texgyre


All:


8. DejaVu Sans

This font is a replacement to Verdana

 


Ubuntu:

$ sudo apt-get install fonts-dejavu

 

All:

  • Visit dejavu-fonts.github.io.
  • Click latest version Download.
  • Click the package link dejavu-fonts-ttf-2.37.tar.bz2.
  • Unzip the package file. 
  • You got multiple font files in .ttf format.
  • Install the fonts.



 
****

See Also

Alternative Fonts Table


References

 

Substituting Calibri and Cambria Fonts by Debian Wiki 

 

****



This article is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.