How to install Times New Roman in 2026

This post feels like a throw back to the late 1990s. I'm publishing it because the only straightforward instructions that I can find are for Debian / Ubuntu.

I wanted to check the appearance of this blog while working on the CSS. I was looking at layout-shifts and the PageSpeed Insights score and I wanted to check the appearance with a standard, default font. Google Chrome on this version of Fedora Linux depends on the Liberation fonts. I understand that Times New Roman is both very common and the default serif font for most browsers. So I wanted to check the appearance of this blog with Times New Roman.

In the late 1990s, Times New Roman along with Arial, Courier New, Webdings (!) and other fonts, were published under a license on https://micrososoft.com. The license permits redistributing the fonts in their original form, so the original .exe files are now mirrored on SourceForge. Debian publishes a package, msttcorefonts, to install the fonts from these .exe files as .ttf files to the local file system. The rest of this post demonstrates obtaining the .ttf files this way using an Incus container; the same approach works for Arial and the other fonts.

Commands to create an Incus container, prompt to accept the EULA, install the Microsoft fonts, copy them to the host and then clean up the container:

incus launch images:debian/13 c1 \
&& incus exec c1 -- sh -c "apt update && apt install --yes msttcorefonts" \
&& incus file pull --recursive c1/usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts . \
&& incus stop c1 \
&& incus delete c1

Command to install Times New Roman for the current user:

mkdir --parents ~/.local/share/fonts \
&& cp msttcorefonts/Times_New_Roman.ttf ~/.local/share/fonts

fc-list | grep -e Times.New.Roman

/home/maxwell-k/.local/share/fonts/Times_New_Roman.ttf: Times New Roman:style=Regular,Normal,obyčejné,Standard,Κανονικά,Normaali,Normál,Normale,Standaard,Normalny,Обычный,Normálne,Navadno,thường,Arrunta