Bexley IT Solutions

You may not be aware, but there are a set of fonts that were developed for a Microsoft project that intended to produce a pack of core fonts for the Internet (see this Wikipedia article for more information).

If you're a Windows or a Mac user, you'll already have the relevant fonts installed as part of the base operating system, however, Linux users aren't so lucky. De to possible license issues, the core fonts aren't generally included as part of most distributions; I've had to install them myself on my desktop running CentOS, and my two laptops, one running Fedora 7, the other Fedora 8.

Now, when I first started using Linux, I never ran into any font issues, so it was only fairly recently that I found out about these "core fonts" - you are probably wondering why you need them on a Linux system. Well, there are two reasons for me installing them on my machines:

• Working with Microsoft document formats; for example, Word documents are often formatted with Times New Roman or Arial (two of the core fonts) - if you open them in Open Office on Linux, without having the fonts installed, the application will select similar fonts from your system to display the document. This can really become an issue if you're working and exchanging documents with people who use MS Office.
• Web-pages may not display correctly; our own fair site, for example, does not display correctly on my Samsung X60 running Fedora 8 without the core fonts installed. I believe that the effect was magnified on my machine as I have a high resolution screen (1680x1050); essentially the text appeared extremely small, too small to read without straining my eyes. This can be a real nightmare for web-developers.

To install the core fonts on a Red-Hat based system, simply follow the instructions on the core fonts Sourceforge project page. This method packages the fonts into an rpm file, which you can install with your package manager of choice.

For Debian based systems, there's a pre-built package available in the contrib repository - there's a guide to installing the fonts, as well as Flash over at the . For Ubuntu, the package is available in the multiverse repository.