Install MS Truetype Fonts system-wide for all users

Question

I would like to install the MS Truetype Fonts that come through the package ttf-mscorefonts-installer, so I did:

sudo apt-get install ttf-mscorefonts-installer

Accepting the license, the process completes without any errors. The fonts end up in

/usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts

as expected. Just to be sure, I also did a

sudo fc-cache -f -s -v

which among other things says in its output:

/usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts: caching, new cache contents: 60 fonts, 0 dirs

So far, so good (and inline with question How do I install fonts?) However, when I then open any font dialog (e.g. in OpenOffice or the font dialog of the terminal) I don't see all of the new fonts. For Arial, the standard form is missing, but bold and italic are there. Times New Roman is missing altogether.

I can use nautilus to browse to the font directory, double click the Arial.ttf file and see the font in all its beauty. I can even click the install button then and the font is copied over to my personal ./fonts directory and from there on visible to my apps. But it is not picked up from the system directory.

How do I get these fonts available system-wide for all users?

Answer 1

Argh, by coincidence I just found the solution. There was a file called ~/.fonts.conf in my home directory that seems to come from Fontmatrix and had a list of rejected fonts, among them the ones I found missing. Simply deleting this file solved the problem. I remember that I had played around with Fontmatrix but I'm not sure what caused it to create this file. Anyway, problem solved.