How To Download and Install Alternative Fonts on Ubuntu

This tutorial will help you download and install fonts listed on the alternative fonts comparison table we published. It means you will practice visiting websites of respective fonts like Carlito‘s and Liberation‘s, downloading, extracting, viewing, installing and finally using them on your system. This is hoped to help you increase document compatibility using LibreOffice and beyond. Happy working!

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We publish this tutorial to honour Free Software Community people who have developed these alternative fonts to help us all. We say thank you to all contributors who made beautiful and useful font families like FreeFont, Liberation, Nimbus / URW, Carlito, Caladea etc. We also say thank you to GNU/linux distributions who have been distributed these fonts built-in especially Debian and Ubuntu.

This font family is replacements to Arial, Times New Roman and Courier New. 

Ubuntu systems:

$ sudo apt-get install fonts-freefont-ttf

All operating systems:

• Visit https://www.gnu.org/software/freefont.
• Navigate to project page (downloads …).
• Navigate to Download (to the top).
• Click a package file e.g.  freefont-otf-20080323.zip to download FreeFont.
• Unzip the package file. 
• You got multiple font files in .otf or .ttf format.
• Install the fonts.

This font family is replacements to Arial, Times New Roman and Courier New. 

Ubuntu:

$ sudo apt-get install fonts-liberation

All:

• Visit github.com/liberationfonts/liberation-fonts.
• Navigate to project page (downloads …).
• Navigate to Releases (to the top).
• Click a package file e.g. liberation-fonts-ttf-2.1.5.tar.gz to download Liberation Fonts.
• Unzip the package file. 
• You got multiple font files in .otf or .ttf format.
• Install the fonts.

This font family is replacements to Helvetica, Times New Roman and Courier New.

Ubuntu:

$ sudo apt-get install fonts-urw-base35

All operating systems: 

• Visit github.com/ArtifexSoftware/urw-base35-fonts.
• Navigate to Releases (to the right).
• Click a package file e.g. Source code (zip) to download Nimbus Fonts.
• Unzip the package file. 
• You got multiple font files in .otf or .ttf format.
• Install the fonts.

This font is a replacement to Cambria. 

Ubuntu:

$ sudo apt-get install fonts-crosextra-caladea

All operating systems:

• Visit fonts.google.com/specimen/Caladea.
• Click Download Family (to the right).
• You will download Caladea.zip.
• Unzip the package file. 
• You got multiple font files in .ttf format.
• Install the fonts.

This font is a replacement to Calibri. 

Ubuntu: 

$ sudo apt-get install fonts-crosextra-carlito

All: 

• Visit fonts.google.com/specimen/Carlito.
• Click Download Family (to the right).
• You will download Carlito.zip.
• Unzip the package file. 
• You got multiple font files in .ttf format.
• Install the fonts.

This font is a replacement to Comic Sans. 

Ubuntu: 

$ sudo apt-get install fonts-comic-neue

All: 

• Visit comicneue.com.
• Click Download (to the top).
• Click comic-neue-2.51.zip to download it.
• Unzip the package file. 
• You got multiple font files in .ttf format.
• Install the fonts.

This font is a replacement to Helvetica.  

Ubuntu:

$ sudo apt-get install fonts-texgyre

All:

This font is a replacement to Verdana. 

Ubuntu:

$ sudo apt-get install fonts-dejavu

All:

• Visit dejavu-fonts.github.io.
• Click latest version Download.
• Click the package link dejavu-fonts-ttf-2.37.tar.bz2.
• Unzip the package file. 
• You got multiple font files in .ttf format.
• Install the fonts.