Install Microsoft TrueType fonts on Fedora

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- One minute read - 144 words

Fedora do not bundle Microsoft’s core Truetype fonts for licensing reasons. Normallly I do not care, personally I prefer Liberation fonts anyway. However, today I needed Verdana.

Traditionally, the way to install these on RPM based distributions has been:

  1. Grab the RPM spec file
  2. Build an RPM from the spec file
  3. Install RPM using the rpm command.

All well and good, however there are a couple of problems.

  • Using RPM directly is frowned upon

Nowadays, Yum does various bits of house keeping in addition to RPM, so this can lead to the rpm and yum databases getting their knickers in a twist.

I get around this with a simple piece of sed/grep:

curl https://corefonts.sourceforge.net/msttcorefonts-2.0-1.spec | grep -v 'Prereq: /usr/sbin/chkfontpath' > msttcorefonts-2.0-1.spec

Now you can do all the usual stuff:

rpmbuild -ba msttcorefonts-2.0-1.spec
yum --nogpgcheck ~/rpmbuild/RPMS/noarch/msttcorefonts-2.0-1.noarch.rpm

Relogin and you will have access to Microsoft's fonts.

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