How To Install Google Fonts on Ubuntu 16.04

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 are free and open-source fonts. It is a huge repository of awesome fonts contributed by many designers.

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).
• A non-root sudo useror access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-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

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 to check the official Google Fonts website.

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