Here’s a relatively quick Linux tip. If you want to know right away how to do this in simple steps, feel free to skip down to the section titled “Just Give Me The Steps!”
I did stumble across an issue with fonts when trying to sync my Obsidian second brain from Arch Linux at home to my Fedora laptop at work.
Namely I was looking for recommended fonts to try out, and I wanted to refresh things with my second brain setup. That’s when I stumbled across Archivo, which impressed me. I installed the Archivo font family on Arch through the AUR and went on my merry way, but installing the font looked less straightforward on Fedora when I was still using that.
In short, I would have to do it the old-fashioned way and download a .zip file containing all of the fonts. Unfortunately for me, that contained a LOT of fonts. I was used to installing fonts by clicking on them within my file explorer, letting the GUI program preview the font, and then click the “Install” button.
Now if I’m only downloading one font here or there, it’s really not a big deal. But with such a comprehensive and complete font family like Archivo…
This would take far too long to install one at a time. I’ll admit that I’ve installed a good amount of fonts and variants before, but this was much more than I ever tackled before at once.
Is There a Better Way?
If there’s anything I know about Linux, it’s that there’s ALWAYS a better way. After digging around, I realized that it would be outrageously easy and fast to install all of these fonts at once on Linux. I’m only embarrassed that I didn’t realize how easy this could be sooner.
Thankfully, all you really need is your downloaded fonts and a terminal emulator of your choice. As usual, I’m still using Kitty because it suits my needs, but you could use whatever terminal you like.
First, download and extract your fonts, if necessary. You can do this graphically if you like, but it really doesn’t matter at this point in the process. Keep an eye on what directory they end up in on your system.
Knowing what directory they’ve been extracted to, pop open your terminal and change (“cd”) to that directory. In the example image above, I would have to type this:
cd Downloads/Archivo/static
This directory should be filled with only fonts. Make sure to double check this.
Once you have confirmed all of the files are fonts, type this command to install all of the fonts in the directory locally:
cp * ~/.local/share/fonts/
What Exactly Just Happened?
For those who need the explanation, this command copies (“cp”) all of the files in the directory (hence the “*”) you changed to and pastes them into a hidden file (always starting with a “.”) directory on your home directory. A GUI program typically installs the fonts to this directory by default, so think of these two terminal commands as a way to really speed up the process and install multiple fonts at once with just a few keystrokes.
Keep in mind that this only installs the fonts for your current account on your Linux system. If you only have one profile to use on your system, then it mostly won’t matter if you do this locally or system-wide.
If you want to do this system-wide, in case you have multiple user accounts on one Linux system, you’ll need sudo privileges along with a different directory:
sudo cp * /usr/share/fonts/
Keep in mind, at least with my experience doing this on Fedora, that all of the fonts on the system-wide directory are organized in folders by family. For my Arch system in particular, they were sorted this way, but two folders had my OTF and TTF fonts separated from the other ones.
Thus, if I wanted to install Archivo this way, my fonts would ideally all be tucked away neatly in a directory named archivo within this directory instead of the local one on my home directory.
How Do I Know it Worked?
You can always list (“ls” command) the aforementioned hidden directories and see if they appear in the results. Since I found this easier to do with my local directory, I would check with this command.
ls * .local/share/fonts/
Just keep in mind you may see a message asking if you would like to display all of your results in the off-chance you have a LOT of fonts already installed. Of course, this command also works with the root directory of fonts as well.
Just Give Me The Steps!
- Step 1: Extract your fonts into a directory.
- Step 2: Change into this directory from the terminal with cd.
- Step 3: Copy all of the fonts with cp * to the appropriate directory or directories. (Just .local/share/fonts/ for the user; you may need to use sudo to install them to /usr/share/fonts.)
What fonts have you been playing with on your system? Do you prefer to install them locally or system-wide? What are some of your favorite fonts you’ve tried on Linux? I’d love to hear what you have to say.
Sudo Science 