Networknet archive Blog

Lucida Grande on Ubuntu Desktop 8.04

Originally published Last updated 4 comments

I use this CSS font-family setting for my Networknet.nl blog:

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font-family:"Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;

When I opened the blog in Firefox on Linux, the font looked different from the one specified in my stylesheet.

Why the font looks different

My Ubuntu machine did not have Lucida Grande installed. Common Windows fonts are not installed on Linux by default, although some can be added later. Lucida Grande was still missing after I installed msttcorefonts.

The msttcorefonts package contains:

  • Andale Mono
  • Arial Black
  • Arial (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
  • Comic Sans MS (Bold)
  • Courier New (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
  • Georgia (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
  • Impact
  • Times New Roman (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
  • Trebuchet (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
  • Verdana (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
  • Webdings

Install the package with:

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sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts

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I found a related post explaining how to get Lucida Grande working. To follow it, I had to install Wine and Safari on my Linux machine.

If you have a Windows installation, copy the fonts from C:\Windows\Fonts to /usr/share/fonts/ttf on Linux.

Load the fonts on the Linux system:

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sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig

After restarting Firefox, my blog looked much the same as it did on Windows.

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The fonts now look right, although I still have some spacing to fix. This was how I quickly got my Windows fonts onto Ubuntu Desktop 8.04.

Related links

4 comments

Comments from the original WordPress site, kept read-only.

  1. Nathan

    For the love of kittens, PLEASE:
    then = conditional or time (if this, thEn that --- or --- this, thEn do that)
    than = comparison (I'd rather eat dirt thAn bugs).

    Every time you use the wrong one, Obama kills a kitten.
    If nothing else, do it for the kittens!

    Source: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/misspelling

  3. Ivan

    Hi Nathan,

    As non-native English speaker I am doing my best to speak and write. With writing my posts in English I can reach more people over the world. I am living an a small country with 16M people and writing in Dutch doesn't really make sense for me.

    One thing I will never forget this and off course I can't fix this misspelling at once. I am updating my site and content. I will keep this misspelling in mind and hopefully spare some kittens.

  4. Nathan

    You're awesome :) Don't feel bad about the misspelling though, even most native English speakers don't use the proper spelling of then/than and they're/their/there. Keep it up, Ivan!