Installing Microsoft TrueType Fonts in Fedora18 / 19 / 20

This is something that I just learned how to do, courtesy of a documentation work that I need to for my college’s fourth semester evaluations, where the requirements state that I need to use Arial / Verdana fonts for my Project Report. The interesting part is that I’m a hardcore Fedora user who uses LibreOffice for all my documentation purposes and as obvious as it may sound, these fonts don’t come pre-installed in Fedora 18. Du-uh? Right? So, I had to distinctly install these fonts on my laptop. How did I do it? Here’s the breakdown.

First here’s a bit of a trivia for those who already don’t know this! (Read: Yack):

Microsoft TrueType fonts (TTFs) are quite commonly found throughout the web, usually specified in stylesheets. However, for Linux users, the most common of these TTFs don’t come pre-installed in most of the common distributions by default. Instead, they are replaced by generic equivalents, usually fallback fonts most commonly defined in stylesheets (again!). This is also true even case of offline documents such as spreadsheets, presentations, or plain .doc files.

Installing TrueType font packages allow you to see content created using these fonts just as the content creator originally intended.

The Microsoft TrueType fonts package includes the following font-families:

• Andale Mono
• Arial Black/Arial (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
• Comic Sans MS (Bold)
• Courier New (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
• Georgia (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
• Impact
• Times New Roman (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
• Trebuchet (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
• Verdana (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
• Webdings

And here’s the part on how to install these fonts! (Read: Hack):

You can install the MS core fonts by installing the msttcorefonts package. Here’s how to do it. The gist describes what to do, and the commands explain how to do using the Terminal. You may need superuser privileges or sudo configured. :-

1. Make sure you have the following rpm-packages installed. Any version should do.
   • rpm-build,
   • wget,
   • A package that provides the ttmkfdir utility. For Fedora Core, ttmkfdir should suffice.
2. Download the latest msttcorefonts spec file from here.
   • cd /tmp
   • wget http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/msttcorefonts-2.5-1.spec
3. Install the cabextract utility.
   • sudo yum install rpm-build cabextract ttmkfdir
4. Build the msttcorefonts-2.5-1.noarch.rpm package.
   • $ sudo rpmbuild -bb msttcorefonts-2.5-1.spec
5. Install the fonts:
   • $ sudo yum install /root/rpmbuild/RPMS/noarch/msttcorefonts-2.5-1.noarch.rpm