My son has been asking me to install a bunch of fonts so that he can use them to create interesting stuff for online games he plays like those from pawntactics.com and runescape.com. He has a Fedora 9 machine and the challenge I have is how does he, as normal user, add fonts. I cannot seem to find a way to do so. I have looked at gnome-appearance-properties and gnome-control-center (which will invoke gnome-appearance-properties) and the “fonts” tab does not have a “Add Font” button. Perhaps a missing feature?
In any case, for the record, what I had to do is to get the fonts that he wanted to use and placed them directly into /usr/share/fonts. They are immediately available to any application (he’s using Gimp and OpenOffice.org).
UPDATE: filed a bugzilla and am downloading the source to control-center from http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/updates/9/SRPMS.newkey/ to see if I can cut some code to fix this.
RE: Adding fonts in F9
I can’t remember where it is documented, but you can add a hidden .fonts directory in your home directory and put your new fonts in there.
Re: Adding fonts in F9
Ah so. But that does not make it available system wide, but I reckon, it should suffice.
It’s unnecessarily complicated. can you file a bug?
I’m really missing that ‘add font’ button as well… I noticed it’s gone in F9+
Yes, just filed https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=471891 it.
~/.fonts
You can simply put fonts into your “font folder”, ~/fonts (if I am not mistaken). The end user path to it is to open the font preferences (it used to be a separeted pref, now it lives as tab on the appearance settings) -> advanced -> “go to font folder”, this should open a nautilus window that you can simply drag font files into it.
The down side is that this procedure install fonts into the user home dir, so those fonts would not be available to other users on the same machine. I don’t think there is a simple way to add fonts to the system.
Re: ~/.fonts
“””
The end user path to it is to open the font preferences (it used to be a separeted pref, now it lives as tab on the appearance settings) -> advanced -> “go to font folder”, this should open a nautilus window that you can simply drag font files into it.
“””
That’s sooooooo easy :-/
I too agree there should be a simple « add font » button. And with PolicyKit, it should be easy to add them for the user or the whole system…
Re: ~/.fonts
The problem is it no longer works this way in Fedora 9. There is no “go to fonts folder”.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2008-May/msg03138.html
Re: ~/.fonts
Hopefully my newly minted BZ will get things moving. I would spend some time looking at the code and providing the patch as well – once I figure out where the code sits (in control-panel I guess).
As others hinted, ~/.fonts is your friend.
If those fonts are free or open, you can package them so they’ll be available to everyone, not just your son
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/Fonts
Lastly if you have particular font-related improvement ideas, just contribute to
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Desktop/Whiteboards/BetterFonts