I am pretty damned sure that fonts are one of the most used yet least appreciated aspects of computing I have come across.
It would be fine to interject here and say NO, surely its “blah de blah”. I say no…… People in general don’t give a damn about how machines work / talk / do their stuff, however they are concerned with how stuff looks.
For instance, look at the fashion industry. Clothes are expensive but the workmanship is generally crap but who cares, its a “scurgly! made by whatsisname”, and it looks good.
Its the same with computers, look at the Mac, previously thought the underdog, now its almost a fashion statement to own one.
Anyway, back to fonts. I am not really that bothered about what fonts are on my machine as long as I can read the text without squinting to much, but just the other day it was noted that I was using “Sans Serif” fonts and I was lacking in “Serif” fonts.
Well… I just shit my pants, what the hell was I missing. Apparently I wasn’t missing anything. Sans Serif add an extra bit to your fonts and I was missing the option of not missing them on everything I read.
To cut a long story short I needed to get some Microsoft fonts installed on my Debian box and this is the process.
First thing I needed was the Microsoft truetype fonts. ON debian these are called
msttcorefonts
and can be installed via “aptitude” or apt whichever you prefer. I fetched these and this installed a whole pile of stuff in
/usr/share/fonts/truetype/
Next thing I needed to do is create a “fonts.scale” file as ROOT
]$ cd /usr/share/fonts/truetype ; ttmkfdir;
sorted. The directory should now have the correct file. The next thing to do is restart either, the font server, or X11. I just logged in and out and that was it. New fancy fonts that are almost identical to the ones I had previously or at least in first inspection they are.