Install Microsoft’s Consolas Font on Mac OS X

3Mar/0910

Install Microsoft’s Consolas Font on Mac OS X

With the introduction of Windows Vista and Office 2007 Microsoft included some new fonts, which became the defaults in Office. Their names all start with ‘C’ and they are quite attractive. In particular there is a monospaced font called Consolas that is nice to use as a text editor font and Terminal font. The problem is they aren’t technically free, although Microsoft does include them in a number of freely available updaters. What follows is how I went about installing the fonts on my Mac.

Download the Open XML File Format Converter for Mac from the Microsoft Mactopia download page.
Double click the disk image if it wasn’t automatically mounted. You will see an Open XML File Format Converter meta package (.mpkg). This is an installer package comprised of several sub-installer packages. One of which is the fonts I was after.
Run the Open XML Fonts Installer package. Running the following in the Terminal will achieve this in a typical Mac OS X install:
open "/Volumes/Open XML File Format Converter for Mac 1.0.2/Open XML File Format Converter for Mac 1.0.2.mpkg/Contents/Packages/OpenXML_all_fonts.pkg"
Follow the prompts and you’re done. You can now configure you text editor and Terminal to use Consolas.

Note: I deemed that the OpenXML_all_fonts.pkg was safe to install without fear that it will install any other rubbish using the lsbom command as follows:

$ lsbom -s /Volumes/Open\ XML\ File\ Format\ Converter\ for\ Mac\ 1.0.2/Open\ XML\ File\ Format\ Converter\ for\ Mac\ 1.0.2.mpkg/Contents/Packages/OpenXML_all_fonts.pkg/Contents/Archive.bom
.
./Calibri Bold Italic.ttf
./Calibri Bold.ttf
./Calibri Italic.ttf
./Calibri.ttf
./Cambria Bold Italic.ttf
./Cambria Bold.ttf
./Cambria Italic.ttf
./Cambria.ttf
./Candara Bold Italic.ttf
./Candara Bold.ttf
./Candara Italic.ttf
./Candara.ttf
./Consolas Bold Italic.ttf
./Consolas Bold.ttf
./Consolas Italic.ttf
./Consolas.ttf
./Constantia Bold Italic.ttf
./Constantia Bold.ttf
./Constantia Italic.ttf
./Constantia.ttf
./Corbel Bold Italic.ttf
./Corbel Bold.ttf
./Corbel Italic.ttf
./Corbel.ttf

This listing shows that the package only contains fonts, nothing else.

Tagged as: consolas, fonts, installer, microsoft, package Leave a comment

Comments (10) Trackbacks (0) ( subscribe to comments on this post )

Billy Bob
June 5th, 2009 - 12:56

Thanks for the tip.

I right-clicked the open-box icon, selected Show Package Contents, opened Contents, Packages, and clicked on OpenXML_all_fonts.pkg.
Guillaume
June 30th, 2009 - 00:58

Thanks for sharing !
eric s
July 1st, 2009 - 04:07

Thanks for the download pointer. Turns out you can also just pull the files out without installing the translator app. Leave the installer volume mounted, then

gzcat /Volumes/Open*/*.mpkg/Contents/Packages/OpenXML_all_fonts.pkg/Contents/Archive.pax.gz | (cd ~; pax –r)

(all on one line)

then open Font Book.app, File->Add Fonts, and point it at the TTF files in your home directory.
Wes
July 1st, 2009 - 08:23

@eric s yep that’s what i was advocating in the post although with a little less command line flair.
Aram
July 20th, 2009 - 22:25

Great tip!

After changing from Tiger to Leopard, I had to re-install my original version of Office 2008. It didn’t automatically install some fonts like the Consolas, Calibri & Cambria, but your tip worked. I’ll spread the word!

I used the way Billy Bob told, because it’s a lot easier if you are not familiar with using Terminal.
Nicolas
October 24th, 2009 - 03:10

Thanks! I can’t live w/o consolas.
linux user
November 14th, 2009 - 13:17

Thanks for this, here is how to install them under Linux

1) Get dmg2img (in a teminal session):

curl –L ‘http://vu1tur.eu.org/tools/download.pl?dmg2img-1.6.1.tar.gz’ | tar xz
cd dmg2img*
make

(If the above make command fails, you are probably missing some headers in a package named openssl-devel or similar. You could also be missing a C compiler, but if you can’t work out how to fix that are you sure you need a programmers font? )

2) Download the DMG. Save it in your home directory.
3) Back in the directory dmg2img was in (the terminal session):
./dmg2img ~/OpenXMLConverter102.img

4) As root (or with sudo before the command) and replacing XXX with your username:

mount –t hfsplus –o loop ~XXX/OpenXMLConverter102.img /mnt

(You can also copy/paste the commands suggested by dmg2img instead)

5) Make a directory for fonts and change to it, then extract fonts (back as normal user):

mkdir consolas
cd consolas
zcat /mnt/Open\ XML\ File\ Format\ Converter\ for\ Mac\ 1.0.2.mpkg/Contents/Packages/OpenXML_all_fonts.pkg/Contents/Archive.pax.gz | cpio –i

6) (As root) Unmount image:

umount /mnt

7) Install the fonts (I will leave that to your DE and if you don’t have a DE you already know how to xset fp rehash, etc)

Enjoy
David Merrill
January 22nd, 2010 - 16:31

Great Tip Thank you!
leo
February 2nd, 2010 - 04:46

wow, awesome job.. thanks everyone!
Jussi
February 26th, 2010 - 13:06

Awesome, thanks a bunch.