Posts Tagged ‘frutiger linotype’

I came across this site the other day which offers a very nice set of themes for Ubuntu indeed. The installation instructions are pretty clearly spelled out, though be warned that it’s a 197MB download if you go for the whole lot in one sitting! I’m currently using the Infinity theme -and it’s icon set is even better than my usual Dropline Neu!

I would suggest making one change to the downloaded themes, however: the choice of desktop font. Which, by swift and neat segue, brings me to the subject of fonts. (Zealots who denounce anything to do with Microsoft, or who like spelling that company name with a dollar sign instead of an ’s’ can look away now!!)

After all these years, I still love Gill Sans. (An excellent article with the opposite opinion can be found here -I think his claim that Gill Sans is the ‘visual heritage of Britain’ is probably why I like it so much! Disagree with the general conclusions of that article as I do, however, it is well worth a read). Anyway: if you do fancy a bit of Gill Sans, but don’t fancy paying Adobe/Linotype for the privilege, a quick trip in a Windows VM to the Microsoft website to download their very old, very zero-cost set of Euro-enabled fonts for MS Publisher will do the trick. That download happens to include a more-or-less complete set of Gill Sans fonts, amongst others. Install it onto the Windows virtual machine and it would be a simple matter to then copy the font files across to your Linux host. Doing this will, however, be in complete breach of the license governing the use of these fonts, so naturally I wouldn’t actually do anything like this at all. Of course.

Aficionados of fine fonts (even ones produced by Microsoft) might also contemplate downloading and installing the free Microsoft Reader in their Windows virtual machines, for that will yield you a fine crop of Frutiger Linotype -though again, it would be quite improper to actually copy the relevant True Type files across to your non-Windows physical PC!

Yet further font munificence from Microsoft can be had by downloading and installing the Powerpoint Viewer 2007, which will get you the likes of Candara, Constantia, Consolas and others. Once again, note the warning on that download page (“[you may use the included font components] only to display and print content from a device running a Microsoft Windows operating system“) and don’t even think of copying those fonts to your Linux PC, will you?

Interestingly, this brings up the fact that Gnome still doesn’t have any decent way of installing fonts (surely a right-click and ‘Install Font’ menu option isn’t too hard to come up with, is it??!) Instead, you have two choices. The simplest way (perhaps) is to go to your home directory and create a new directory called .fonts (all lower case and including the fullstop/period at the beginning to make it a hidden folder -so make sure Nautilus’ Edit->Show Hidden Files option is switched on), then copy your True Type font files into that directory. That gives you exclusive access to your new fonts pretty much immediately, though you may need to re-start already-running applications before they become aware of them.

Alternatively, if your PC is accessed by several different people at different times, you may want to make the new fonts available system-wide, and to do that, you copy your True Type font files into the /usr/share/fonts/truetype directory. (You may want to create a new directory in there called ‘myfonts’, for example, just to keep things tidy. Otherwise, dropping the files directly into that truetype directory will do just fine).

Quite a nice selection of fonts which can be quite legitimately copied onto a Linux box (as best as I can tell, anyway) is available from here. Don’t forget, too, that the “Liberation” fonts are installable from within Ubuntu’s Synaptic Package Manager.