What is Google Fonts

Google Fonts are free and open source fonts. It is huge repository of awesome fonts contributed by many designers.
According to Google Fonts Team:

All of the fonts are Open Source. This means that you are free to share your favorites with friends and colleagues. You can even customize them for your own use, or collaborate with the original designer to improve them. And you can use them in every way you want, privately or commercially — in print, on your computer, or in your websites.

Steps to install Google Fonts On Ubuntu

It is important that package called Fontconfig should be installed on your Ubuntu system.

1. Check/Install Fontconfig

First verify do your ubuntu desktop has fontconfig package installed. Use the below given to verify

sudo dpkg -l |grep fontconfig

If it is installed on your Ubuntu system then skip to Step 2 else use below given command to install fontconfig package.

sudo apt-get install fontconfig

2. Create directory .fonts

Now create a directory in user’s home directory.

mkdir ~/.fonts

3. Download Google Fonts

Download the google fonts inside directory ~/.fonts which we have just created in Step 3. Also unzip the google fonts downloaded file inside same .fonts directory.

cd ~/.fonts && wget https://github.com/google/fonts/archive/master.zip && unzip master.zip

4. Build font information cache files

Now build font information cache files by using the command below given command

sudo fc-cache -fv

Wait for a few minutes till the command get successfully finish.

That’s all, now in your Ubuntu system google fonts are available. You can find the google fonts available to others application also like gimp,gedit etc.