Ubuntu offers a lot of fonts, in addition to the defaults installed, and the MicroSoft msttcorefonts package, in its repositories. All these fonts mentioned here are provided as packages, which can easily installed using command line tools like apt-get or using Synaptic. These fonts will come in handy for designing flyers, or for designing headers and graphics for the web using the Gimp. Also, some of these fonts are pretty commonly used to render pages, like Lucida.

I will save the packages with the biggest collection of fonts for the end here. Since I have included screenshots of most of the fonts, and this article is sorta long, please read on by clicking the “More” link below.

Gentium

This is one of my favorite fonts. Gentium calls itself a “Typeface for the Nations”, and looks beautiful. You can install Gentium by doing a:



$sudo apt-get install ttf-gentium





The design is intended to be highly readable, reasonably compact, and visually attractive. The additional â€˜extendedâ€™ Latin letters are designed to naturally harmonize with the traditional 26 ones. Diacritics are treated with careful thought and attention to their use. Gentium also supports both polytonic and monotonic Greek, including a number of alternate forms. These fonts were originally the product of two years of research and study by the designer at the University of Reading, England, as part of an MA program in Typeface Design.

Fonts from Dustismo

These designer fonts were designed by Dustin Norlander of Dustismo. Here’s some sample of the fonts:







You can install all of Dustin’s fonts using:



$sudo apt-get install ttf-dustin

George Williams’ Fonts

George Williams is a font developer (with his own Wikipedia page, no less!) who provided the fonts Monospace, Caslon, Caliban and Cupola. Check out the samples below:







You can install these fonts using:



$sudo apt-get install ttf-georgewilliams

Some Juicy Fonts

The ttf-sjfonts package provides the two fonts, Delphine and Steve Hand which are also available from sourceforge. These are two handwriting fonts, as seen below:







You can install these two fonts using:



$sudo apt-get install ttf-sjfonts

Sun Java6 Fonts - Lucida

Installing the sun-java6-fonts package installs the Lucida fonts and also installs the java6 binary package - so if you install the font package you get Java6 for free! This seems to be weird, but this post is about fonts. The package install Lucida Sans, Lucida Bright and Lucida Typewriter:





You can install these three fonts using:



$sudo apt-get install sun-java6-fonts



Caution: This will also install sun-java6-bin etc - so you will have a working Sun Java 6 if you choose to install this. This is not a “bad” thing, but it can take some time to download and install.

Larabie Fonts

Ray Larabie has been “making fonts and giving them away since 1996″ on the popular font destination LarabieFonts.com. We have three packages in Ubuntu that provide the Larabie fonts, or at least the ones that are free. These three packages provide the “Deco”, “Straight” and “Uncommon” Larabie fonts. Since there are way too many of these fonts, 300+ ? I lost count after a hundred :-), I will link you to a pdf file with samples of all the fonts. Click on the preview below to see the Larabie Fonts Catalogue (Size: 2.5 MB):







You can install all of the Larabie fonts using:



$sudo apt-get install ttf-larabie-deco ttf-larabie-straight ttf-larabie-uncommon



Of course, you could just install one of these packs by removing the names of the other two packages.

Summary

If you want to get all the fonts in one go, use the following command:



$sudo apt-get install ttf-gentium ttf-dustin ttf-georgewilliams ttf-sjfonts sun-java6-fonts ttf-larabie-deco ttf-larabie-straight ttf-larabie-uncommon

These fonts should together provide enough gunpowder for the novice graphic designer in Ubuntu. If you are wondering how I took the sample screenshots, the answer is gnome-specimen, which provides an easy way to preview the fonts installed on your system. It can be installed using:



$sudo apt-get install gnome-specimen

To see more free fonts that are available for Linux systems, visit the Free Font Resources for Open Source OSes Page - it seems to be current since I can already find the Red Hat Liberation Font listed there.

If I missed any TrueType font packages in Ubuntu here, please let me know in the comments.

Update: If you add Seveas’ feisty-extras repository, you can get your hands on the ttf-fossfonts package.