Improving fonts in Fedora 15

Update: This procudere works with Fedora 16 too.

Fedora 15, by default ships with very thing fonts, which I find strain my eyes to much. Some of the fonts, like in the Application menu are small, even on my 14-inch laptop. Fixing this is not too difficult.

If you don't see a problem with your fonts in Fedora 15 you can stop here :)

Gnome Tweak Tool. I recommend that you download the Gnome Tweak Tool. Fire up the terminal, log in to root (Command: su) and type in the following command, and click enter:

yum install gnome-tweak-tool

This will allow you to change fonts, adjust font sizes, scale fonts, and tweak hinting and anti-aliasing. It will also allow to you customize other features on the Gnome 3 desktop.

Depending on you screen and preferences this might be enough. In the end, I really wanted better fonts. 

My favorite are Microsoft TrueType fonts which are free to download off the Microsoft website. There is no Fedora Linux package for download, but a file which downloads the fonts and packages them into an RPM was created. To install  Microsoft TrueType fonts you have to run a series of commands in the terminal:

su -c "yum install rpm-build ttmkfdir cabextract"
    

mkdir -p ~/rpmbuild/SOURCES
    

wget http://fenris02.fedorapeople.org/msttcore-fonts-2.0-4.spec
    

wget http://fenris02.fedorapeople.org/09-msttcorefonts.conf -O ~/rpmbuild/SOURCES/09-msttcorefonts.conf
    

rpmbuild -bb msttcore-fonts-2.0-4.spec

su -mc "rpm -Uvh ~/rpmbuild/RPMS/noarch/msttcore-fonts-2.0-4.noarch.rpm"

su -c "ttmkfdir /usr/share/fonts/msttcore"
 

fc-cache

Depending on your "ideology", you may or may not want to do this. You can find other font options at FedoraUnity.

I really like Microsoft's TrueType fonts, since it makes your Linux box render fonts similarly to a Windows machine and a Mac. Since, I am not abandoning Microsoft Windows, and  also use a MacBook, having familiar looking fonts is easy on the eyes.