Fonts for Collabora

June 5, 2026

I’m currently running NextCloud with Collabora as the online office suite through Docker. It’s been working well for me but I realized the other day it didn’t have fonts I just expected it to have. I had a look at the host system and noticed it didn’t either. The fonts I was particularly interested in were Times New Roman, Arial and Verdana.

So first thing I did was install the fonts on the host system.

sudo apt update && sudo apt install ttf-mscorefonts-installer

This only works if you have enabled contrib and the non-free repositories. You can find how to do this here.

Then I added these volumes in my docker-compose for collabora:

     - /usr/share/fonts:/usr/share/fonts/
     - /usr/share/fonts:/opt/cool/systemplate/usr/share/fonts/

This setup the installed fonts on the host as the fonts available to collabora.

After a docker compose down and then a docker compose up -d the online software picked up the fonts. No more fuss than that.

/usr/share/fonts is a common location for the fonts on your host but, if you’ve done something to make that a different location than use that instead.

I’m writing this up this way as the solutions I was finding online are not direct and to the point. There are several ways to get this done but from what I can see this is the simplest way to make this happen.