Download Smart package of Microsoft’s core fonts Download Free

How to install

It is now easy to install Microsoft’s TrueType core fonts for the web on any rpm-based linux box with TrueType support. The instructions below have been tested on various Red Hat and Fedora Core systems, but they are fairly generic, so should apply to any redhat-like Linux distribution, such as Mandrake or Yellowdog. If you’re running debian, take a look here. If you drive suse, please take a look here.

1. Make sure you have the following rpm packages installed from your favorite 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 utility
2. Install the cabextract utility. For Fedora Core users, it is available from Extras. Others may want to compile it themselves from source, or download the source rpm from fedora extras and rebuild.
3. Download the latest msttcorefonts spec file from here
4. If you haven’t already, set up an rpm build environment in your home directory. You can do this by adding the line %_topdir %(echo $HOME)/rpmbuild to $HOME/.rpmmacros and creating the directories $HOME/rpmbuild/BUILD and $HOME/rpmbuild/RPMS/noarch
5. Build the rpm binary with this command:
   • $ rpmbuild -bb msttcorefonts-2.5-1.spec
   • This will download the fonts from a Sourcforge mirror (about 8 meg) and repackage them for easy installation.
6. Install the newly built rpm using the following command (you must be root):

* # rpm -ivh $HOME/rpmbuild/RPMS/noarch/msttcorefonts-2.5-1.noarch.rpm 7. You may need to reload the X font server. Normally this is done as part of the installation process (this is done by chkfontpath). However, in some situations it seems that you need to reload or restart the font server manually. I am told that the last argument must be reboot and not reload on Mandrake 9.0 * # /sbin/service xfs reload * A bug in RedHat 8.0 causes the X server to lose connection to the font server if the font server is restarted instead of loaded again. It will cause various strange behavior (changed fonts in newly opened applications, applications hang). Logging out and logging back in will solve the problems, or just use ‘reload’ instead of ‘restart’. 8. Enjoy your new high quality fonts. To verify that the installation was successful, use the command ‘xlsfonts | grep ^-microsoft’. You should see a whole bunch of microsoft font names there. Note that you will need to restart all programs that you want to make aware of the new fonts. Also note that not all fonts have ‘microsoft’ in the name, some of them will be from ‘monotype’ instead.

Characteristics

• Does not distribute Microsoft’s fonts in a prohibited manner (to the best of my knowledge)
• Does not bypass the rpm database like other font installation scripts