Linux gets “Arial” which is never Arial, but often Liberation Sans, or Noto, but maintains the status quo. Android gets Roboto, but we don’t specify it since it was clobbering Debian; If all else fails, sans-serif. As for general font sizes, I think our fonts have always been too small. Font Options on openSUSE. The openSUSE GNOME desktop allows fonts to be specified for a number of different display categories: Application font - The font used to display text in application windows. This also changes the font used to display items such as the menus in the desktop panel.
If you did not migrate your account yet, visit https://idp-portal-info.suse.com/
- 2Font installation and rendering issues
- 2.1Getting some TrueType fonts
Background information
The FreeType project of David Turner attempts to create an independent implementation of the TrueType standard (as well as other font standards). FreeType is included in SUSE 10.0, and is available for prior releases.
There are potential patent infringements in FreeType 1 because parts of the TrueType hinting virtual machine were patented by Apple, a fact not mentioned in the TrueType standards. (Patent holders who contribute to standards not published by a major standards body such as ISO are not required to disclose the scope of their patents.) FreeType includes an automatic hinter that analyzes glyph shapes and attempts to generate hints automatically, thus avoiding the patented technology (see Freetype - Patents). The automatic hinter generally improves the appearance of free or cheap fonts, for which hinting is often either nonexistent or automatically generated anyway, but it can degrade the appearance of professional hand-hinted fonts, and does not work at all well for non-Western text that requires a different approach to hinting. As a result, many people prefer to enable the patented hinting technology.
FreeType 2 is a font service and doesn't provide APIs to perform higher-level features, like text layout or graphics processing (e.g., colored text rendering, 'hollowing', etc.). However, it greatly simplifies these tasks by providing a simple, easy to use and uniform interface to access the content of font files.
FreeType 2 is released under two licenses: BSD-like FreeType License and the GPL. As such, it can be used by any project, F/OSS or commercial.
Font installation and rendering issues
Arial Font In Opensuse Linux Pdf
Many Linux users are unsatisfied with font rendering under X11, but it can easily be improved. Note that some of the following refers to patented technology. You do not need a special license for your private usage, but you might need one in order to distribute any of the packages that we will build. For patent information, refer to External links below.
Arial Font In Opensuse Linux Download
Getting some TrueType fonts
Online updates
Most Linux distributions contain a basic set of TrueType fonts, but these are often not the best ones that we can find. Microsoft released some high quality TrueType fonts as freeware some years ago.
In order to install them, start YaST and do an online update. Look for the update fetchmsttfonts. It should be checked by default (Unless you also have some pending package management stack update). fetchmsttfonts is a script that automatically download and install the MS TrueType corefonts for you. These fonts are freeware and do not require a license for any Microsoft product.
Vista ClearType fonts
If you want to get the new Microsoft ClearType fonts, you need to install the fetchvistafonts from the openSUSE Build Service.
- Download fetchvistafonts. (Select the noarch rpm)
- Open a terminal use zypper to install the package
Example:
Warning: The GUI installer fails to trigger the necessary install script.
From Microsoft products
If you have a license for a Microsoft product, especially the Windows operating system, you can use additional fonts. They are in the %WINDIR%FONTS directory of your Windows installation, copy them into /usr/share/fonts/truetype and execute the following: openSUSE <= 12.2
openSUSE >= 12.3
This is necessary in order to make X11 aware of the new fonts.
If you have a license for the Windows operating system without having it installed anywhere, you can download some fonts that belong to the Internet Explorer web browser that is part of the Windows operating system. The most valuable font distributed with the Internet Explorer web browser is Tahoma. Get it from here. In order to extract the actual TrueType fonts, execute the following:
Copy tahoma.ttf and tahomabd.ttf into /usr/share/fonts/truetype and run SuSEconfig or fonts-config.
Congratulations, your TrueType fonts are now installed!
NOTE: It is recommended that you make a backup copy of the folder [/usr/share/fonts/truetype] prior to adding the Microsoft fonts inside because at least one user corrupted his fonts directory by adding certain fonts from MS that proved incompatible.
Adjusting your desktop preferences
Installing TrueType fonts does not modify your desktop preferences in any way. In order to take advantage of your new fonts, open your KDE or GNOME control center and choose one of your new fonts. The best screen fonts are Arial, Tahoma or Verdana at sizes from 8 to 10. If you prefer a serif font, try Georgia.
Note that anti-aliasing is no longer necessary since the TrueType bytecode interpreter was activated. Disable it completely or restrict it to sizes above 12 or 15.
You might want to adjust the preferences of your web browser as well. For Mozilla Firefox, open Edit - Preferences - General - Fonts & Colours and choose your new fonts there.
See also
External links
Arial Font In Opensuse Linux
Questions or comments? Contact me at noa@resare.com. Good luck! / noa
News
- 120909 Ouch, that was a few years. Due to the kind contributions of Deven T. Corzine we now have an updated (and working!) package again.
- 060430 A long awaited overhaul. Many things are fixed, links updated. Selects a random mirror. Uses tahoma from word 97 viewer instead of the ie6 update so no windows license is needed.
- 030331 Updated the package to match the new location of the Tahoma cab file on microsoft's download site
- 021108 Added link to suse adaption of the .spec file
- 021107 Updated the Tahoma font link, as Microsoft moved their file
- 021026 Removed the python hack as it rarlely needed anyway. That means that only the spec file is interesting nowdays. Updated misc other things as well.
- 021026 It seems like this page got linked. First The Register, then that article was linked from slashdot.
- 020827 A friendly soul over at Microsoft informed me that the Tahoma font was never a part of the 'core fonts for the web' initiative and has unclear licensing, so I've removed it
- 020815 Microsoft pulls their fonts from their site. Fortunately, according to the End User License Agreement and the faq I have the right to redistribute the fonts in unaltered form. This right I intend to exercise.
- 020409 Installing doesn't work on 1.1-2. Fixed in 1.1-3
- 020312 Upgrading doesn't work on versions prior to 1.1-2. You will need to remove the old package with 'rpm -e' and than install the new one with 'rpm -i'.
- 020312 Version 1.1
- cabextract is now in a separate package, so no gcc toolchain is needed to follow the instructions
- The Tahoma font is included
Just the fonts
The original unaltered .exe files as downloaded from microsoft.com when they were available here
If you don't have a rpm based distribution, you can compile the tool to extract the .ttf files from the .exe files, cabextract from source, found here
How to install
Installing Microsoft's TrueType core fonts for the web on any rpm based linux box with TrueType support is now easy. The instructions below have been tested on various Red Hat and Fedora Core systems, but they are fairly generic so they should apply to any redhat-like linux distribution, such as mandrake or yellowdog. If you are running debian, please have a look here. If you are running suse, please have a look here
Make sure you have the following rpm-packages installed from from your favourite distribution. Any version should do.
- rpm-build
- wget
- A package that provides the ttmkfdir utility. For example
- For Fedora Core and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, ttmkfdir
- For old redhat releases, XFree86-font-utils
- For mandrake-8.2, freetype-tools
Install the cabextract utility. For users of Fedora Core it is available from extras. Others may want to compile it themselves from source, or download the source rpm from fedora extras and rebuild.
Download the latest msttcorefonts spec file from here
Maschine 2 serial. If you haven't done so already, set up an rpm build environment in your home directory. You can to this by adding the line %_topdir %(echo $HOME)/rpmbuild to your $HOME/.rpmmacros and create the directories $HOME/rpmbuild/BUILD and $HOME/rpmbuild/RPMS/noarch
Build the binary rpm with this command:
This will download the fonts from a Sourcforge mirror (about 8 megs) and repackage them so that they can be easily installed.
Install the newly built rpm using the following command (you will need to be root):
You might need to reload the X font server. Normally this is done as a part of the installation process (this is done by chkfontpath). However in some situations it seems like you need to reload or restart the font server manually. I am told that the last argument needs to be restart and not reload on Mandrake 9.0
A bug in RedHat 8.0 makes the X server lose the connection to the font server if the font server is restarted instead of reloaded. That will cause assorted strange behaviour (changed fonts in newly opened applications, applications hanging). Logging out and logging in again will solve the problems, or just use 'reload' instead of 'restart'.
- Enjoy your new high quality fonts. To verify that the installation succeeded, please use the command 'xlsfonts | grep ^-microsoft'. You should see a whole lot of microsoft font names there. Please note that you need to restart all programs that you want to make aware of the new fonts. Note also that not all fonts have 'microsoft' in their name, some of them will be from 'monotype' instead.
Features
- Does not distribute Microsoft's fonts in a prohibited way (to the best of my knowledge that is)
- Doesn't bypass the rpm database like other font install scripts