so - why use Microsoft Fonts ? Simple - most automated Tools generating these Even if you use OpenOffice, you might still want all the Microsoft TrueType fonts so that documents created using Word or PowerPoint look as they were supposed to when you open them with OpenOffice. Also, with the Microsoft Fonts installed web browsing will be better since the pages will look as the designer originally intended them to. Most webpages are designed with Microsoft fonts in mind. The stylesheet specify these fonts. On Linux, when these specified fonts are not available on your computer, they are replaced with generic equivalents.

With these fonts installed, you will see the page as it was designed. To install the fonts, all you need to do in Ubuntu is to install the msttcorefonts package. Instructions for installation are given below.

The Truetype Microsoft fonts provided by the package include: 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.

Installing Microsoft and Liberation Truetype fonts on Ubuntu

You can install the MS core fonts by installing the msttcorefonts package. To do this, enable the Universe component of the repositories. After you do that, use the following command from the command line:

$sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts  ttf-liberation

This will give you the core fonts, but if there are other TrueType fonts that you want installed, it is as easy as copying the font files to the ~/.fonts/ directory.

After installing new fonts, you will have to log out and log in again to be able to see and use the new fonts. If you want to avoid this, you can regenerate the fonts cache by issuing the following command:

$sudo fc-cache -fv