Installing custom fonts on Ubuntu Server

I would like to install a custom TTF or OTF font on Ubuntu Server, but I don’t want to have to install a GUI or desktop environment. Is there a way to get this custom font (Fira Code Nerd Font) to be used as the terminal font for Ubuntu Server?

>Solution :

There are a couple of things you will need to do to make this work. So long as you don’t mind fiddling around with fonts, follow these steps:

I – Convert the .ttf font to a .psf

1. Install the bdf2psf package:

   sudo apt install bdf2psf
   

2. Convert the font to an intermediary .bdf:

   otf2bdf -p 18 -r 96 -o fc-nerd.bdf fc-nerd.ttf
   

   ^{Note: Be sure to replace fc-nerd with the actual font name.}

   You may need to modify the -p value to match the glyph size, as it’s not standard.

3. Convert the .bdf to a .psf:

   bdf2psf --fb fc-nerd.bdf /usr/share/bdf2psf/standard.equivalents /usr/share/bdf2psf/fontsets/Uni2.512 512 fc-nerd.psf
   

4. Move the file to the appropriate location:

   mv fc-nerd.psf /usr/share/consolefonts/fc-nerd.psf
   

II – Set the Font

1. Use setfont to configure the console:

   setfont fc-nerd 
   

If the font doesn’t look right, go back to the first set of steps and modify that -p value until it looks better.

If you would like to use the font every time you sign into the console, you can add the setfont command to the end of your ~/.bashrc file.