Remove non-latin fonts from Ubuntu

How to uninstall non-Latin alphabet fonts on Ubuntu and unclutter the font list box in all applications

The default Ubuntu installation comes with a lot of fonts. This is a good thing. Many of the latin have good support for Extended character sets. But no matter what locale and/or installation language you choose, Ubuntu will install by default some non-latin fonts for Japanese, Thai, Ethiopian, Myanmar, Lao, Tibetan, Korean, Punjabi, Sinhala, Arabic and Khmer languages.

I don't know whether these fonts are ever needed by the operating system (i.e. for the language choosing settings or for displaying some web pages) but as a latin alphabet user I don't need them and I didn't like the fact that they were cluttering my font selection dialog without being of any use to me. So I decided to uninstall them.

The list below is tested on Ubuntu 16.04. I managed to free about 100 MB by removing these fonts. And now, my font selection box (in LibreOffice, GIMP, Inkscape, etc.) is filled with latin only fonts that I can use. You can see in the screenshot below how it looks before and after removing the unneeded fonts.

To remove these fonts you need to know in what packages are they located. The following command contains probably all of them (Ubuntu 16.04). Copy and paste this into a terminal and hit Enter to remove the fonts. You need to enter your password.

sudo apt purge fonts-kacst fonts-kacst-one \
fonts-khmeros-core fonts-lklug-sinhala \
fonts-lohit-guru fonts-guru fonts-nanum \
fonts-noto-cjk fonts-takao-pgothic \
fonts-tibetan-machine fonts-guru-extra \
fonts-lao fonts-sil-padauk fonts-sil-abyssinica \
fonts-tlwg-* && sudo apt autoremove

If you want them back, use this command:

sudo apt update && \
sudo apt install fonts-kacst fonts-kacst-one \
fonts-khmeros-core fonts-lklug-sinhala \
fonts-lohit-guru fonts-guru fonts-nanum \
fonts-noto-cjk fonts-takao-pgothic \
fonts-tibetan-machine fonts-guru-extra \
fonts-lao fonts-sil-padauk fonts-sil-abyssinica \
fonts-tlwg-*

That's all you had to do. There are a lot of good looking latin fonts in Ubuntu, and most of them seem to have extended Unicode character sets. You can now choose anything from the font list box.