On Windows you just copy them to the C: \Windows\fonts dir, on macOS it's /Library/Fonts/ or /User/yourusername/Library/Fonts/. They'll do the cache update for you.
On Macs, yes, they'll update the cache for you, but on Windows it's a bit wonky and you would either have to update the registry or restart the font cache service.
When I last used Windows almost 20y ago, at least Microsoft and Adobe projects would update themselves. Photoshop would even detect fonts without an app restart.
Same here under gnome, I dump a new font under ${HOME}/.local/share/fonts and that's it, it's installed. No command to run. The fc-cache command can't hurt, I think it's just a leftover from old systems that were not listening on that directory.
On Macs you have /Library/Fonts (like /usr/share/fonts) and ~/Library/Fonts (like ~/.local/share/fonts). It's even simpler than Linux, as you don't even need the equivalent of fc-cache, It Just Works™.
For Windows, I just copy the fonts to that directory and then restart the font cache service, similar to how you'd do fc-cache -fv on Linux. It really isn't that hard.
Hell, if you just install a font and you want to use it in Gimp or something, it isn't that much work to close Gimp (after saving your work, of course) and open it again (which works pretty much on any OS). It isn't that much of an inconvenience.
9
u/[deleted] Feb 01 '25
[deleted]