For those who are dealing with writing or design projects, it is common for you to come across a font that your applications cannot support. It could be a Macintosh font, a bitmap font or a open type font (otf), for some reason or another, you just can’t get your application to read it. In such cases, the best way is to convert this font to TrueType font (ttf).

Fontforge is an outline font editor that allows you to create your own postscript, truetype, opentype, cid-keyed, multi-master, cff, svg and bitmap (bdf, FON, NFNT) fonts, edit existing ones and convert one format to another.

In your terminal, type

sudo apt-get install fontforge

Open Fontforge (Applications -> Graphics -> FontForge)

Load up the font that you want to convert.

Without making any changes, go to File -> Generate Fonts. Save the file with extension .ttf

Depending on the source file, it might generate some errors message. Click Save to continue saving.

You have a .ttf font in your folder now.

Installing your new font

Go to your Home folder (Places -> Home Folder)

Create a new folder and name it .font (include the dot in front of the font). Copy the new ttf font into the folder.

Restart your application. It should be able to detect the new font now.