Installing TrueType font files in Lubuntu 22.04

Yesterday I looked through some old CDROMs with a view to disposing of them. I came across one from 2001 from a company called Focus Multimedia Limited, titled ‘4,000 fonts – A comprehensive collection of stylish and professional fonts’ for Windows 95 / 98 / Me / NT / 2000 / XP. It is still readable and contains both PostScript and TrueType font files, as well as a Windows application called BOSS Font Manager to view the fonts.

I decided to install the TTF fonts on one of my machines: the family desktop running Lubuntu 22.04. I followed one of the many articles on the Web regarding installing TTF fonts in Ubuntu, but LibreOffice did not list the new fonts in its drop-down menu of fonts. It turned out I needed one more step in order to make the new fonts accessible: I needed to change the permissions of the TTF files that I had copied to the Linux fonts directory. Anyway, below I list all the steps I followed in order to install the new TTF fonts.

1. I inserted the CDROM in the machine’s optical drive

Lubuntu mounted it automatically onto /media/fitzcarraldo/BOSSFONTS/, and a directory /media/fitzcarraldo/BOSSFONTS/Fonts/ contained two sub-directories PSFonts and TTfonts. The latter sub-directory contained sub-directories named ‘A‘ to ‘Z‘, each containing *.ttf font files.

2. I created a system-wide sub-directory for the new font files

As the fonts appear to be from a US company called Arts & Letters, and the CDROM is labelled ‘BOSSFONTS‘, I chose a sub-directory name ‘BossFonts‘ to hold the font files in the Lubuntu system, in order to keep the system directory /usr/share/fonts/ tidy and to segregate the new font files:

user $ sudo mkdir /usr/share/fonts/BossFonts

3. I copied the font files to the directory

user $ sudo cp -r /media/fitzcarraldo/BOSSFONTS/Fonts/TTfonts/*/*.ttf /usr/share/fonts/BossFonts/

4. I updated the system’s font cache

user $ sudo fc-cache -f -v

5. I checked if the fonts were installed

user $ fc-list | grep "BossFonts"

Everything seemed OK, but, when I launched LibreOffice Writer, the new fonts were not shown in Writer’s drop-down menu of fonts.

6. I checked the permissions of already-existing font files and the new font files

user $ ls -la /usr/share/fonts/truetype/noto | head -n 5
total 1132
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root   4096 Jan 10  2022 .
drwxr-xr-x 57 root root   4096 Nov 24  2021 ..
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 107848 Nov 10  2020 NotoMono-Regular.ttf
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 523412 Dec 26  2020 NotoSansMono-Bold.ttf

user $ ls -la /usr/share/fonts/BossFonts/ | head -n 5
total 129260
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root  69632 Apr 23 10:18 .
drwxr-xr-x 9 root root   4096 Apr 23 10:16 ..
-r-------- 1 root root  41868 Apr 23 10:18 ache___b.ttf
-r-------- 1 root root  40868 Apr 23 10:18 ache__cb.ttf

7. I changed the permissions of the new font files

user $ sudo chmod 644 /usr/share/fonts/BossFonts/*.ttf

user $ ls -la /usr/share/fonts/BossFonts/ | head -n 5
total 129260
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root  69632 Apr 23 10:18 .
drwxr-xr-x 9 root root   4096 Apr 23 10:16 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  41868 Apr 23 10:18 ache___b.ttf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  40868 Apr 23 10:18 ache__cb.ttf

Now LibreOffice Writer lists all the fonts. Job done.