Ubuntu: More Fonts

In the dawn of the second century of the third millennium I thought the time was now finally right to switch to a 64-bit operating system on my desktop, so I installed Karmic AMD64.

After every re-install you have missing applications or packages and this is a good cleaning process. You just do not reinstall the crap you don’t need anyway and think about what things you actually need. So I was thinking about fonts this morning.
The absolute non-Ubuntu-default minimum for me is:

apt-get install ttf-inconsolata sun-java6-fonts

This installs Raph Levien’s Inconsolata and the Lucida fonts. Both make coding a lot nicer. If interested in a lot more fancy fonts I can recommend this great article for 300+ free fonts.

In case that is still not enough for you, you can also quite easily install the new Vista fonts by Microsoft (Consolas, Calibri, etc), as described here or manually like this:

1. download the Office 2007 Comparability Pack
2. make sure you have cabextract installed
3. extract the *.ttf files and put hem in ~/.fonts

Microsoft should consider making it legal to add those to the mscorefonts package, they look really good.

Here’s a nice “top 10″ list of programming fonts: http://www.hivelogic.com

Finally, for webdesign I want to recommend this site: http://www.typechart.com