Artwiz fonts on Ubuntu Hardy
May 25, 2008
The artwiz fonts, a set of bitmapped ‘futuristic’ fonts, are no longer in Ubuntu’s (Hardy’s) repositories. But don’t despair! Though installing these fonts is no longer as easy as apt-getting it, installing them manually isn’t that hard.
Download the fonts from this Sourceforge page. These are the ‘improved artwiz fonts’ that should work in Gtk2 and KDE3 applications. Once you reach the download page, you’ll see there are three versions available: German (de), English (en) and Swedish (se). These are basically the same fonts, but with different language encoding support (think ü, ö, etc.). You’ll only need one of them; pick the one you like.
If you want full ISO-8859-1 support, you can also use the artwiz latin1 fonts.
Extract the archive and move the extracted folder to /usr/share/fonts/X11/misc (the examples below use the English (en) font set)
tar xvjf artwiz-aleczapka-en-1.3.tar.bz2
sudo mv artwiz-aleczapka-en-1.3 /usr/share/fonts/X11/misc
Renew your font cache:
sudo fc-cache -f -v
Reconfigure your fontconfig settings:
sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig
Enable the use of bitmapped fonts:
sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig-config
Answer the questions as follows. First select the font tuning method (I chose Native):
Set the subpixel rendering of the fonts to ‘Automatic’:
And finally, enable bitmapped fonts:
Once you have restarted X, you should be able to use the artwiz fonts in your Gtk, Qt and Openbox settings.
If you want to use the artwiz fonts in conky, you no longer have to disable xft. To display conky with the artwiz font snap, use the following settings:
use_xft yes
font snap-7
Finally, if you want the artwiz fonts to also show up in xfontsel, specify the path to your artwiz fonts in the “Files” section of your /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Here is what that section looks like on this computer:
Section "Files"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/X11/util"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi/:unscaled"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi/:unscaled"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/X11/Type1"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/X11/misc/artwiz-aleczapka-en-1.3/"
EndSection
Restart X, and you should be able to select them in xfontsel.
Thanks to Ubuntugeek and the Ubuntu Wiki.
urukrama's weblog 
Thank you so much for this. I was really having a hard time getting these installed.
thanks from me too! I’m using this in fluxbox. Now to find a fluxbox theme and a conky rc I like using artwiz.
Or you could install older packages, say Gutsy’s.
http://packages.ubuntu.com//gutsy/xfonts-artwiz
i had a problem with those fonts, i can’t resize them in the font selection menu, the size is always 10, no matter what size do I set… Sorry for my english, I’m from Venezuela.
As far as I know, you can’t resize artwiz fonts.
thanks a lot for those tips, these are great fonts and it was always kinda tricky for me to set them up.
Hello and thanks! And assuming this works the same way with other fonts than artwiz’ – dubbel-thanks 😉 Just one note regarding the “sudo fc-cache -f -v”, I had to do it the way the README-file described so future readers might want to check that out. This one’s going straight to the “handy bookmarks” dir!
Thank you, was looking around for ever, wondering how to get these beauties working on Intrepid.
Hi there! I followed you guide step by step and i can correctly see those fonts in xfontsel.
But i can’t see them in conky…Here it is an extract of my .conkyrc, where do i go wrong?
use_xft yes
font snap-7
xftfont nu:size=7
xftalpha 1
text_buffer_size 2048
[…] fonts occasionally changed, and good documentation is hard to find. In 2008 I explained how to install the artwiz fonts in Ubuntu Hardy, but those guidelines have not worked for many […]