How can Linux Mint have fonts of Windows?

I have recently installed Linux Mint 10 on my system and the download and the installation of this operating system really worked in a fine manner. I was using the Browser the default one on the system and with that I went to the some of the sites and I have seen that when I was on the Windows PC the site used to look different and when I went to the same site with the Linux Mint system I have seen a remarkable change. At first I thought that it might be some type of issue with the browser but later I realized that the issue was not because of the browser but because of lack of some of the FONTS. Well I want to have an explanation on this for sure. How can I have some of the fonts installed on LINUX MINT so that this difference can be minimized?

Yes really; you have just caught the right place that might be causing you the issue. Actually the thing is that when you go with the installation of the actually fresh installation of Linux or any one of its distributions. You will see that it will not be able to open the sites in the manner as it will open on the Windows Machine. The reason for this is that most of the sites where designed so that they can be viewed with Microsoft/Windows fonts. Accordingly the web pages were created with keeping the fonts in Mind. So if you are on the new Linux based PC then you will see some of the site and web pages with different fonts. Hope that this reason must have cleared your issue that you are stuck with at the moment.

Here is the thing that you can try for sure. First of all you will be required to make a back of /etc/fonts folder. So that if something goes wrong then you will be able to have the right and the working things with you there. Open up the terminal and then run the following command there: sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts. Once you are done with this then you will be required to download the packages that will content the fonts for the Windows. Please see that it may happen that you will have to make a download for the multiple packages. Well do that. After downloading all the files you will be required to extract all the files from .tbz to /etc/fonts folder. At the final step you will have to make the system reboot.

If you want to have the fonts from the Microsoft then let me tell you that Microsoft fonts are actually proprietary. Because of this reason they are not available with the Linux and other Linux distros by default. Way back Microsoft had launched a packet that had some of the Fonts that can be used on any of the Operating System. If you want you can also have this package on your system so that it can be integrated here with your existing fonts. The package included the following fonts: Andale Mono; Arial Black; Arial; Comic Sans MS; Courier New and Times New Roman. Please see for this package and get it installed in the manner as described above. See if that really help you with the packages there.

If at all you want to have the installation of the Arial, Times New Roman and other Microsoft TrueType fonts then here is the step that you will be required to follow:
In Debian / Ubuntu this is the command that you will have to run: apt-get install msttcorefonts
In Fedora:

1. First run cd / tmp
2. After this you will have to type: wget http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/mst...nts-2.0-1.spec
3. Then you will be required to make use of the yum command and you will have to run this: yum install rpm-build cabextract
4. yum-localinstall nogpgcheck \
5. / Usr/src/redhat/RPMS/noarch/msttcorefonts-2.0-1.noarch.rpm
6. Make the above command run and then you will have the font for you. After running the above commands you will have Andale Mono, Arial Black, Arial (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic) and many more Microsoft TrueType fonts installed for you.

If you have made a dual boot on the system then you can have the installation of the Windows Fonts on your system in a pretty nice manner. All you will be required to do is copy ttf from the Windows Partition and then paste it to the fonts:// location. If this does not work then you can go with creating the .fonts folder. You will be required to make this in your home directory. After that just copy the necessary fonts to it and then you will have access to these fonts that too with much less issues. See if the above two methods really helped you.