Probably every organisation
has favourite fonts or simply fonts that are needed in order to maintain compatibility
with documents created with older software and archaic computer systems.
Fortunately importing TrueType fonts into SuSE Linux 9.2 is a trivial
matter. Poor quality fonts used to be a legitimate grievance for Linux users,
but not any longer. Follow this article to have beautiful fonts quickly
available for your GNU/Linux users.
Introductory preamble
This “howto” article will assume that you are running KDE as an ordinary
user on the system (ie, not as “root” or some other priviliged user).
Installing fonts to be available to all users:
You will need the font files that you wish to install. In our office
these are kept in a shared directory on a file server so that they can be accessed
over the network by any machine on the local netowork. However, you might
keep your font collection on a CD / DVD or on a diskette. Just make sure
that they are accesible to the local machine before you go any further.
- Bring up the main menu by clicking on the lizard
head button (it doesn't look like lizard head until you know that it is
one) and then choose:
control centre
system administration
font installer.
- Click the administrator mode button
that is near the bottom of the window and enter the root password when prompted.
- You will now be presented with a list of directories into which you can install
fonts. To avoid conflicts with existing fonts and to make it easier to manage
your font collection it is a good idea to create your own directory. You
can create a directory by right-clicking on the directory window and choosing
“New Folder”. In this example we will call the directory
“Corporate”. Having created the directory select it so that the
location (shown near the top of the window) will now be fonts:/Corporate/.
The file list will now be blank (because you haven't put any fonts in there yet!).
- Click the Add Fonts button that
is near the bottom of the window, and choose the fonts. In our case we keep
the required fonts in a directory on a file server but you could have them on
CD or DVD, floppy diskette. Select all the fonts that you want to install
and click the open button. A popup
window will show you the progress as the fonts are copied and made ready.
When the copy process is complete another PopUp will appear telling you that you
will need to reatart applications in order for the fonts to be visible; click
the OK button to get rid of that PopUp window.
- If you need to install more fonts repeat the process from step 4.
- Now restart KDE by using Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to shut down the X-Windowing system.
This is the fastest way of ensuring that all applications are restarted with the
new font information.
- Log-in as whatever user you want to be. The fonts should now be available
to all applications and to KDE itself.
Installing fonts to be available to only one particular user:
Follow the steps given above but skip steps two and three. The fonts
will be installed in a directory below the current user's home directory.
Using the fonts in KDE:
The KDE control centre has its own window for changing the fonts used for window
title bars, menu options and so on. After you have installed your new TrueType
fonts you might like to change the fonts that KDE uses. This can be done
easily with following steps:
- From the main menu, choose the KDE control centre
- Go throught control centre menu, choosing
Appearance and Themes
Fonts
- Alter fonts to suit your personal tastes.
These font settings are stored in the files
~/.kde/share/config/kdesktoprc
~/.kde/share/config/kdeglobals
Editing these files might be a quicker way of changing the font settings if
you are an administrator and need to adjust the settings for multiple users.
End of article