Skip to main content

Installing Fonts

See the Arch wiki on Fonts for much more information. Some of this information has been copied from there for my own reference / notes.

List Installed Fonts

These commands will list installed fonts, see the subcategories below for sorting through installed fonts.

# List all installed fonts
fc-list

# List verbose information on a font
# Shows us font family, full-name, and postscriptname
# If this isn't grepped, we will list ALL fonts verbosely
fc-list -v | grep Weather

# List fonts for specified lang
fc-list -f '%{file}\n' :lang=ar
#+ list all japanese font families
fc-list -f "%{family}\n" :lang=ja

Aliases

Font aliases such as serif, sans-serif, monospace, and others can be used to list fonts with the below command -

fc-match monospace

Unicode Character Support

This is useful when trying to verify that the proper font is installed for displaying a unicode character.

For example, the below is matching a font for the character for a pile of poo, or U+1F4A9 -

# Match unicode character with supported font
fc-match -s monospace:charset=1F4A9

Input this character into vim by running :UnicodeSearch! U+1F4A9 or enter <Ctrl><V>U1F4A9 while in insert mode within vim.

Installed by Package Manager

To list fonts installed by Pacman -

## list font packages installed by pacman
fc-list -f "%{file} " | xargs pacman -Qqo | sort -u

Manual Installation

To install fonts manually, see the ~/.local/share/fonts directory and copy the correct font file format within. For example, to install Weather Icons simply clone the repository and copy the needed Font File to the ~/.local/share/fonts directory.

For me, the file I needed was weathericons-regular-webfont.ttf, which installed the font with the full-name Weather Icons, seen by the output below -

fc-list -v | grep Weather
        family: "Weather Icons"(s)
        fullname: "Weather Icons Regular"(s)
        postscriptname: "WeatherIcons-Regular"(s)

Sometimes it may be necessary to then run fc-cache to update the font configuration cache on our system, but generally this will be handled automatically. Nevertheless, it is a simple step to perform and ensures the font is fully recognized by our system.

If the font is not appearing in a terminal or application, ensure that the app or terminal is configured to use the newly installed font.

Misc

The below, and some of the other commands here, from user thisoldman on Arch discussions -

## list all fonts and styles known to fontconfig
fc-list : | sort
## list monospace fonts by family and file
fc-list -f "%{family} : %{file}\n" :spacing=100 | sort
## all bold fonts
fc-list :style=Bold | sort
Back to top