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Dan Dascalescu
Asked: 2016-09-04 23:35:15 +0800 CST

Remove unused fonts [duplicate]

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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:

A mess of regional fonts

fonts

3 Answers

  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
    • 14

  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

    font manager screenshot

    • 6

  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.

    • 2