Fonts
Most distributions now use the fontconfig method for managing fonts (fontconfig.org). You can easily change font sizes, add new fonts, and configure features like anti-aliasing. Both GNOME and KDE provide tools for selecting, resizing, and adding fonts.
Resizing Desktop Fonts
With very large monitors and their high resolutions becoming more common, one feature users find helpful is the ability to increase the desktop font sizes. On a large widescreen monitor, resolutions less than the native one tend not to scale well. A monitor always looks best in its native resolution. However, with a large native resolution like 1900 × 1200, text sizes become so small they are hard to read. You can overcome this issue by increasing the font size. Use the font tools on your desktop to change these sizes (System | Preferences | Look And Feel | Fonts on GNOME; for KDE, select the Fonts entry in the Control Center’s Appearance and Themes).
Adding Fonts
To add a new font (for both GNOME and KDE), just enter the fonts:/ URL in a file manager window (Open Location in the GNOME File menu). This opens the font window. Drag and drop your font file to it. When you restart, your font will be available for use on your desktop. KDE will have Personal and System folders for fonts, initially showing icons for each. For user fonts, open the Personal Fonts window. Fonts that are Zip archived, should first be opened with the Archive manager and then can be dragged from the archive manager to the font viewer. To remove a font, right-click it in the font viewer and select Move to Trash or Delete. User fonts will be installed to a user’s .fonts directory. For fonts to be available to all users, they have to be installed in the /usr/share/fonts directory, making them system fonts.
On KDE, you do this by opening the System folder, instead of the Personal folder, when you start up the fonts viewer. You can do this from any user login. Then drag any font packages to this fonts:/System window. On GNOME, you have to log in as the root user and manually copy fonts to the /usr/share/fonts directory. If your system has both GNOME and KDE installed, you can install system fonts using KDE (Konqueror file manager), and they will be available on GNOME.
To provide speedy access to system fonts, you should create font information cache files for the /usr/share/fonts directory. To do this, run the fc-cache command as the root user.
Configuring Fonts
On GNOME, to better refine your font display, you can use the font rendering tool. Open the Font Preferences tool (System | Preferences | Look and Feel | Fonts). In the Font Rendering section are basic font rendering features like Monochrome, Best contrast, Best shapes, and Subpixel smoothing. Choose the one that works best. For LCDS, choose Subpixel smoothing. For detailed configuration, click the Details button. Here you can set smoothing, hinting (anti-aliasing), and subpixel color order features. The subpixel color order is hardware dependent. On KDE, in the KDE control center, select the Fonts entry under Appearance and Themes. Click the Use anti-aliasing for fonts check box, and then click the Configure button to open a window to let you select hinting and subpixel options. On GNOME, clicking a font entry in the Fonts Preferences tool will open a Pick a Font dialog that will list all available fonts. On KDE, clicking any of the Choose buttons on the Control Center’s Fonts panel will also open a window listing all available fonts. You can also generate a listing with the fc-list command. The list will be unsorted, so you should pipe it first to the sort command. You can use fc-list with any font name or name pattern to search for fonts, with options to search by language, family, or styles. See the /etc/share/fontconfig documentation for more details.
Microsoft common web fonts are freely available from fontconfig.org. These fonts are archived in Microsoft’s cab format. You will need to download and install the cabextract tool (available from most distribution software collections and repositories) to extract the fonts. Once extracted, you can copy them to a folder in the /usr/share/fonts directory to make them available to all users. If you have access to a Windows system, you can also directly copy fonts from the Windows fonts directory to your /usr/share/fonts directory.