How do you remove fonts from Ubuntu?

Question

When I look at the font list in OpenOffice in Ubuntu there are dozens of fonts that all look the same. They are obviously there for various non-latin alphabets but I have not installed those language packs so the fonts all appear as plain sans. It would be nice to get rid of the ones I don't use to shorten the list and make it easier to find the ones I want. It would also speed up the loading time of the word processor. I would also like to install a few replacement fonts so that they are available to all users, (ie. not just by putting them in my .fonts folder).

Answer 1

You can check where the font are located from

/etc/fonts/fonts.conf

Common locations for fonts :

1. /usr/share/fonts
2. /usr/local/share/fonts

And I guess with admin privileges you can delete them.

Answer 2

For me it worked to remove the font packages. I removed those on Ubuntu 12.04 (aka Precise Pangolin):

ttf-indic-fonts-core ttf-punjabi-fonts ttf-wqy-microhei
fonts-kacst* fonts-lao fonts-takao-pgothic fonts-tlwg* fonts-nanum
fonts-khmeros-core

(this is an updated list from the one I found on an article about removing non-English fonts.)

Answer 3

I found the 'font-manager' package useful to disable (without removing) these international fonts. This seems to solely disable the font for the current user, leaving them in the list for other accounts.

To make things easy:

sudo aptitude install font-manager