晓风残月

title: Installing Windows Fonts on Arch-based Distributions
date: 2020-07-16 23:54:28
tags: [archlinux,font]
categories: System Optimization
photos: /img/banner/images/18.jpg
description: Installing Windows fonts on Arch-based distributions for single system use.

Background#

In daily life, there are always some strange requirements that require the use of "office". For Linux users, although they can use WPS instead of MS Office suite, they still face a big problem: there is no Windows font library!

Imagine this, you need to submit a Word document for your assignment that requires the use of the font "Microsoft YaHei", but this font is not available on Linux. What do you do? You open a PowerPoint presentation made by your teacher, and everything is misaligned due to missing fonts. What do you do?...

After facing this problem countless times, I came up with the idea of installing Windows fonts.

Note: This article documents the entire packaging process. If you want to directly obtain the packaged software, please click here.

Installation#

After searching, most of the solutions found online involve mounting the Windows font directory. However, as a Linux single system user like me, this is not a feasible option XD

So, I opened the all-knowing Arch Wiki and followed the instructions to the ttf-ms-win10 AUR page. Before installing, let's take a look at the author's top comment:

FAQ, please read before posting:

1. I get an error that the sources cannot be downloaded: Please read the instructions on the top of the PKGBUILD.
2. Some fonts are missing in my copy of Windows (e.g., holomdl2, corbel, chandra, …): It seems that Microsoft distributes some fonts only with some Windows versions. You can just comment out the corresponding line in the PKGBUILD and then build with “makepkg –skipchecksums”.
3. Some fonts have different checksums: We keep the checksums synchronized with our own Windows installations that are regularly updated. Different Windows versions, different ISOs etc. may contain fonts in different versions/variants. Just build the package using “makepkg –skipchecksums”.
4. Why does the version not correspond to the latest Windows 10 build: If fonts have not changes between builds, there is no reason to change the version number of this package.
5. Why are some fonts (e.g., traditional chinese, japanese etc.) not included here, not even in the corresponding split packages: We currently only include fonts that are installed on a standard Windows installation, without additional feature-on-demand packages (see: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/fonts/windows_10_font_list).

Hmm... it's already very clear. Let's clone the project first:

git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/ttf-ms-win10.git
cd ttf-ms-win10

Following their instructions, let's take a look at the PKGBUILD:

vim PKGBUILD

First, there is a copyright statement that using "Microsoft fonts" outside of Windows is illegal.

To avoid legal issues, the package does not come with Windows fonts. Instead, it provides two methods:

1. Obtain from an existing Windows system (if I had one, I would just mount it!)
2. Extract from the Windows installation package

So let's follow their steps:

• Download the Windows 10 installation package from here

• Open the ISO image and extract sources/install.wim

• Install wimlib and extract the wim format

  Copy

  sudo pacman -S wimlib
  # Switch to the directory where install.wim is located
  wimextract install.wim 1 /Windows/{Fonts/"*".{ttf,ttc},System32/Licenses/neutral/"*"/"*"/license.rtf} --dest-dir fonts
  

• Place all the extracted fonts in the same directory as PKGBUILD, and execute:

  Copy

  makepkg
  

  As expected, the third issue mentioned by the author occurred. Different Windows versions may contain different versions/variants of the same font, causing the hash value check to fail and the script to exit.

  The solution is also mentioned by the author, just skip the checksums check:

  Copy

  makepkg –skipchecksums
  

After a long wait, the packages for various languages should have been built. Now, all you need to do is:

sudo pacman -U ./ttf-ms-win10-zh_cn-version.pkg.tar.xz

And you're done!