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<h1>Installing Custom Fonts on Linux from the Command Line</h1>
<p>2022-09-20</p>
<p>Installing custom fonts is a fairly streamlined feature on operating systems like MacOS and Windows. Linux, on the other hand, struggles to make this workflow <em>easy</em> for everyday users. Many newcomers tend to get frustrated with using the default "Fonts" application managers shipped with most Linux distros.</p>
<p>But I'm here to tell you to <strong>ditch</strong> those GUI font installers. Let's install our custom fonts in the command line!</p>
<h2>Get Your Font Files</h2>
<p>You can't install custom fonts if you don't have any. For this tutorial we are going to assume that we are trying to install a typeface set named <code>LinuxFont</code>. We are going to assume that we have already downloaded and extracted a folder named <code>LinuxFont</code> into our <code>Downloads</code> directory.</p>
<p>Inside this hypothetical folder is a collection of <code>OTF</code> (opentype) font files. This will be important information in a moment.</p>
<h2>Terminal Time</h2>
<p>Now our goal is to simply copy this new typeface folder into our user font directory. Open Terminal and run the following from your <code>Downloads</code> directory:</p>
<pre><code>sudo cp -r LinuxFont /usr/local/share/fonts/opentype/
</code></pre>
<p><strong>Important</strong>: If your font files are NOT opentype format, be sure to copy your files to the proper directory (truetype for TTF, etc.)</p>
<p>Next we need to make sure we have full read and write privileges for this new folder:</p>
<pre><code>sudo chmod -R 0777 /usr/local/share/fonts/opentype/LinuxFont
</code></pre>
<p>The last thing we need to do is reload the font cache on our system:</p>
<pre><code>sudo fc-cache -fv
</code></pre>
<p>That's it! You should now have access to your custom typeface in all your applications system wide.</p>
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