fonts in linux

I had some time to kill a few days ago, & I wasn’t in the mood to study for my university entrance exam, so I spent some time learning how to download & install a font through the linux kernel. I had some experience with downloading fonts from my time in Windows. In Windows, if I remember correctly, all you had to do was … OK, I think I may have forgotten. Maybe you just download the .otf files & click on them, & staying true to Window’s bias on GUIs, a system panel opens up saying if you want to download the font or not on your machine. I had some experience with that. Now, that’s all gone.

My main priority was to download my favorite font “Charter” on linux (Mac users have it on their system by default, I think; lucky!). I wanted to do it through the kernel because that’s how most linux stuff are. I first encountered Charter in Apple Books when I used to read books on my phone (nowadays I use an e-reader because it’s far less distracting & much nicer for my eyesight). I was in the middle of reading The Angels Are the Reapers by Alden Bell when I decided to configure & mess around with all the fonts available in Apple Books. That was when I first learnt about the font’s name. I don’t remember if Charter was the default font in Apple Books. Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn’t. Anyways, that was the first time I had a name for this elegant font I found very satisfying to read in. With Charter’s serif characters & its humble elegance, I finally had a font I could read in for hours & not get a headache because of computer strain. The font itself used to be propriety under Bitstream Inc, but they released it as open source a while back. So, not only does it satisfy my demands of beauty & character, but it’s also open source, hence why I like it so much. I probably used it on Windows for about a year or two till I switched to Linux recently. Then I didn’t see Charter for a few weeks & was only reminded of its existence when I was doing some reading work on the computer & remembered how I used to use Charter all the time back on Windows.

In my mission to download Charter, the first thing I did was consult Claude. I told Claude I wanted to do everything within the kernel. Beforehand, I’d tried searching for a Charter font package with “sudo apt search charter”, but couldn’t get anything. I came to the realization that Ubuntu didn’t offer Charter as an official .deb package in their built-in repos. So I did what Claude suggested me to do. I downloaded the font files from the designer’s website at practicaltypography.com & cd-ing my terminal to the package’s location, I ran a couple of complex commands I had no idea were. I mean, I really had no idea what I was running. I was just copying the commands Claude instructed me on, & pasted them in the terminal line & hit enter. I tried to understand those commands but I was too much of a Linux beginner to understand them (I still am). That was about twenty minutes of work, & in the end, nothing happened. Charter didn’t show itself installed in my computer. Being drenched in confusion for a good minute, I decided to just click on the .oft files instead. The Fonts app opened up, & asked me if I wanted to install Charter on my Linux machine. I said yes, & downloaded all the variants too (Italic, Bold, Bold Italic). This GUI method took only under a minute. I was not happy in the end, but I got what I wanted. And I learned something valuable too about Linux: not everything about Linux needs to be done through the kernel, & sometimes it’s good not to.