Remove unused fonts

Question

How can I get rid of fonts I'll never use, for locales I'll never need?

Ubuntu's Font Viewer comes with tons of fonts for every locale imaginable - Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Arabic, Urdu, a bunch of fonts called Kacst, some called Qran etc.

With all due respect for those folks, probably even they are only going to need ONE of those regional fonts on their machine, tops. As for the rest of the world, we'll be fine with Latin.

BleachBit cleans up unused localizations, but doesn't clean up unused fonts.

I don't care about the disk space, but these fonts pollute the font space and make selecting the fonts I really want a mess:

Solution 1

You are using Kubuntu I see from the screenshot. Unfortunately, it depends on fonts-noto-cjk which is very large in size (almost 110 MB) and sometimes causes hang on font cache refreshing.

Remove it with the command

sudo apt remove fonts-noto-cjk

Other font you mentioned are kacst (which are arabic variants). Remove it with

sudo apt remove fonts-kacst-one

You might want to remove these fonts packages too!

• fonts-lao
• fonts-lklug-sinhala
• fonts-sil-abyssinica
• fonts-sil-padauk
• fonts-tibetan-machine
• fonts-thai-tlwg

Remove them all with this command

sudo apt remove fonts-lao fonts-lklug-sinhala fonts-sil-abyssinica fonts-sil-padauk fonts-tibetan-machine fonts-thai-tlwg

Removing these fonts may remove kubuntu-desktop metapackage. That's Ok. Removing these metapackages won't do harm. This could also trigger removing of other regional fonts, remove them with

sudo apt autoremove

If after removal you ever need these fonts, but you can't be sure which package is needed, just install kubuntu-desktop, it should pull sufficient regional fonts.

sudo apt install kubuntu-desktop

Solution 2

Try this..

sudo apt install font-manager

I think you can only disable the fonts, but that might do the trick for you.

Try selecting the font on the right side and then right click

Solution 3

If you have synaptic installed, you can search for the term "font" and then select the packages you don't need to be uninstalled.

If only Ubuntu installation would be location-aware and wouldn't install Nepalese or Gujarati fonts with every installation.

Comments

[Dan Dascalescu]

I've closed my own question as a duplicate, with the best answer being this one.

[Dan Dascalescu]

The screenshot is from Unity actually. Here are all the "fonts" packages installed by default on a fresh Ubuntu + Wine (not sure if Wine actually brought any fonts).

[Dan Dascalescu]

fonts-lohit-guru is a Punjabi font, fonts-wqy-microhei sounds Chinese, and I'm not sure what the Khmer font is about. Font Viewer is the most rudimentary font tool I've seen. Can't search, can't look at anything more than [0-9.:,;(*!?')A-Z].

[Dan Dascalescu]

After removing Kacst and the lao..thai fonts, the following packages are no longer required: pastebin.ubuntu.com/23131539

[Anwar]

@DanDascalescu That's fine! Remove them too. Those are regional supporting font. but keep in mind, some package mind install them forcefully. such as wine. fonts-tlwg-purisa-ttf is a Thai Purisa TrueType font according to the description

[Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy]

You have two downvotes. Neither of those is mine. But good job on editing your answer

[daniels]

On Ubuntu 16.04 I also removed the following packages/fonts: fonts-stix (math symbols), fonts-lohit-guru and fonts-guru-extra. Even more could be removed but the fonts dialog now looks much cleaner and now I can actually find a font.

[Dan Dascalescu]

The current version of Font Manager has checkboxes for fonts. Uncheck to disable.

[jave.web]

There are now much much more, lots of them are listed in comments to this article and a few in the article itself - onetransistor.eu/2016/08/…

[jave.web]

1 of removal commands from comments there: sudo apt purge fonts-kacst fonts-kacst-one fonts-khmeros-core fonts-lklug-sinhala fonts-lohit-guru fonts-guru fonts-nanum fonts-noto-cjk fonts-takao-pgothic fonts-tibetan-machine fonts-guru-extra fonts-lao fonts-sil-padauk fonts-sil-abyssinica fonts-tlwg-* fonts-beng fonts-beng-extra fonts-deva fonts-deva-extra fonts-gubbi fonts-gujr fonts-gujr-extra fonts-kalapi fonts-knda fonts-lohit-* fonts-noto-* fonts-orya* fonts-pagul fonts-sahadeva fonts-samyak-* fonts-sarai fonts-smc fonts-smc-* fonts-taml fonts-telu fonts-telu-extra && sudo apt autoremove