Working with fonts in Debian and Ubuntu

Install fonts

There are a lot of fonts in standard Debian repository. Packages which contains fonts starts with fonts-, so lets install them all. Run the next command as root:

apt-cache search ^fonts- | sed 's/^\(fonts-[^ ]*\).*$/\1/' | xargs apt-get install

Short explanation of the command:

• apt-cache search ^fonts- - find all packages which starts with fonts-;
• sed 's/^\(fonts-[^ ]*\).*$/\1/' - filter output to get only package names;
• xargs apt-get install - pass package names to apt-get install to install them.

Preview fonts

Now you have more than 1500 fonts, but it's hard to pick one that you need, because it's hard to look through all of them. For our luck there exist specials to preview fonts, and one of is called fontmatrix. Lets install it:

apt-get install fontmatrix

And run it:

fontmatrix

Now it's much easier to select right font!:)