Ubuntu – How to add Times New Roman WITH IPA EXTENSIONS

fonts

I'm looking for an easy way to install the Times New Roman font (which I need for my dissertation) that has the IPA extensions. The one that comes with the ttf-mscorefonts-installer does not have them, and I was hoping that someone here would know which version does.

Best Answer

You may not need to. Many applications, for example LibreOffice Writer and Inkscape, will automatically fall back to displaying missing glyphs with whatever next-best font covers them. You can see how substitutes rank on your system with fc-match:

$ fc-match -a 'Times New Roman' family | uniq
Times New Roman
Liberation Serif
Nimbus Roman No9 L
DejaVu Serif
…

It's no surprise that the first choice for Times New Roman is Times New Roman itself (license: proprietary). Restricting the results to those that cover the IPA extensions eliminates Ubuntu's partial distribution of Times New Roman (intended for, but not restricted to, web use), as you've seen, but it doesn't eliminate everything:

$ fc-match -av 'Times New Roman' \
  | grep --perl-regexp '\s*(family|0002):' \
  | grep --before-context 1 '0002: ........ ........ ....ffff ffffffff ffff.... ........ ........ ........' \
  | grep --only-matching --perl-regexp '(?<=family: ").*(?=")' | uniq
DejaVu Serif
FreeSerif
Doulos SIL
DejaVu Sans

What this means is that, in supporting applications, when you enter a character belonging to the IPA extensions and set its font to Times New Roman, you will actually see a glyph from DejaVu Serif (license: free nonstandard).

This should allow you to compose documents that would use the IPA extensions of Times New Roman if they're available, but which don't on your system only as a matter of presentation.

The one thing you may want to change is which fonts are substituted for display of the IPA extensions on your system, since DejaVu Serif is substantially different from Times New Roman and in my opinion makes a poor substitute for it. I'd recommend configuring your system to give higher preference to FreeSerif (license: GPL), which is metric-compatible with Times New Roman. Doulos SIL (license: OFL) is very similar, but it has has slightly different metrics and is only available in regular weight.

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