Fonts are often overlooked when switching or reinstalling operating systems, and when they're gone, it's a real hassle to try to get the right ones back again. You can spend hours or days trying to figure out where your favorite anti-aliased serif font came from and how to get it back onto your system, and for some people, not having Windows fonts in GNU/Linux is a dealbreaker. So here's how to back up your fonts and install them into GNU/Linux.

You might not think that fonts are a big deal, that they aren't worth worrying about. Fonts are funny that way; as important as they are, you don't care about them until your text looks jagged and horrible, or you can't seem to make your presentation or letter look decent. Once they're gone, you might not notice that your font selection has diminished until it's too late.

All desktop GNU/Linux distributions come with a variety of standard fonts, but if you want Times New Roman -- my favorite font for writing articles and books -- or one of the many other proprietary fonts provided by Microsoft, Adobe, or Corel, you will have to transplant them into your new operating system. Fortunately, fonts are stored in standard formats, so you don't have to do any file conversions.

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