In this tutorial, we will show you how to install and configuration of Google Fonts on Ubuntu 16.04. For those of you who didn’t know, Google Fonts is a library of over 1,000 free licensed font families, an interactive web directory for browsing the library, and APIs for conveniently using the fonts via CSS and Android. It was launched by Google in 2010 to provide web designers and developers with a wide array of open-source fonts to use on their websites or digital products.
The Google Fonts library includes fonts of various types, including serif, sans-serif, display, handwriting, and monospace, among others. Each font family in the library comes with a set of different weights and styles, providing a broad range of typographic options.
One of the key features of Google Fonts is its ease of use. To use a font from Google Fonts on a website, you simply choose the font you want to use, select the styles and character sets you need, and then add a line of code to your website’s HTML. The selected font is then served to your website by Google’s servers, ensuring fast load times and reducing the load on your own server.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of Google Fonts on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus).
Prerequisites
- A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution.
- It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
- SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
- An active internet connection.
- A
non-root sudo useror access to theroot user. We recommend acting as anon-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.
Install Google Fonts on Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus
Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt-get commands in the terminal.
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade
Step 2. Installing Fontconfig.
Now use the following command to install Fontconfig:
sudo apt-get install -y fontconfig-config
Step 3. Create directory .fonts.
Now create a directory in the user’s home directory:
mkdir ~/.fonts
Step 4. Download Google Fonts from GitHub.
Download the Google fonts inside a directory ~/.fonts which we have just created, Also unzip the Google Fonts downloaded file inside the same .fonts directory:
cd ~/.fonts && wget https://github.com/google/fonts/archive/master.zip && unzip master.zip
Next, build font information cache files:
fc-cache -fv
Wait for a few minutes till the command gets successfully finished. That’s all, now in your Ubuntu system, google fonts are available. You can find Google fonts available in other applications also like gimp, edit, and many more.
Congratulations! You have successfully installed Google Fonts. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Google Fonts on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Google Fonts website.
