How to use Comic Sans and other Microsoft Fonts in Linux Mint

If you have migrated from Windows to Linux Mint, you might quickly figure out that some (widely used) fonts are missing. As fonts are installed system-wide, this has an effect on all applications using the fonts. From classical text writing applications, such as LibreOffice Writer, to graph software, such as GIMP.

If you miss the most used fonts (Arial, Comic Sans MS, Verdana, …), installed by default on Microsoft Windows, no reason to panic! Luckily there's a very easy way to get these fonts to your Linux Mint machine.

TTF MS Core Fonts

The ttf-mscorefonts-installer package contains exactly these fonts from the Windows world. Just install it using apt:

ck@mint ~ $ sudo apt install ttf-mscorefonts-installer

Note: You need an active Internet connection, as the font installer downloads additional files from the Internet.

The console output of this package installation is rather large, compared to other apt package installations. The output also shows which fonts are downloaded and extracted. For example the Comic Sans MS (comic32) font:

Extracting cabinet: /var/lib/update-notifier/package-data-downloads/partial/comic32.exe
  extracting fontinst.inf
  extracting Comicbd.TTF
  extracting Comic.TTF
  extracting fontinst.exe

All done, no errors.

After the successful installation, the Microsoft fonts are now usable.

Note: If you have your application, where you want to use the MS fonts, already open, you might need to restart this application.

Comic Sans MS & Co now available

The newly installed Microsoft fonts are now select-able from your application where you want to write text. In the example below using LibreOffice Writer:

Comic Sans MS and other Microsoft fonts can now be selected on Linux Mint

As of writing this article in January 2025, the following Microsoft TrueType Fonts (TTF) and their variants are bundled in the installation package:

Andale Mono
Arial Black
Arial (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
Comic Sans MS (Bold)
Courier New (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
Georgia (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
Impact
Times New Roman (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
Trebuchet (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
Verdana (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
Webdings

Claudio Kuenzler

Claudio has been writing way over 1000 articles on his own blog since 2008 already. He is fascinated by technology, especially Open Source Software. As a Senior Systems Engineer he has seen and solved a lot of problems - and writes about them.