“helvetica vs arial…” how does that affect the end user? not a damn thing. because Picard clearly wins.
Make it so, Number 1.
I estimate I have saved at least 3 hours of my life because Arial is right at the top of the font selection list box and I would have had to scroll down 300 fonts to select the H’s …
Thanks Bill!
CodingFontTobi or Proggy FTW if you code!
Davide,
That is a good point. But what if Helvetica was the default font?
Then you would have to scroll up 300 fonts select the A’s.
If you are so much worried, you could type instead of scrolling.
Or else you could uninstall some fonts. Fonts eat up your RAM and they reduce the start up speed of your computer.
If you have 300 fonts between A and H, I (smartly 
) calculated that you would have about 1114 fonts in your computer!!!
What is that? A font-server?
But the discussion leads directly to another hugely important twenty-first century problem: how do you copyright the completely abstract, pure intellectual property that is a font?
The way out is clear: don’t fall to the fallacy that “completely abstract, pure intellectual” things should be treated as property.
Thinking With Type is indeed an awesome book and a great starting point for anybody who is interested in typography. Helvetica Neue rendered in Safari 3 on OS X 10.5 is bliss. 
Wingdings - The Movie
How Bill Gates got rich and the NYC conspiracy.
Can’t wait.
Helvetica itself is an imitation of the Folio typeface. Folio was
a product of Hell (A german typsetting company, before they got
bought by Linotype).
Monotype made Helevetica somewhat uglier than Folio in order
to avoid having to pay royalities to Hell. Since Monotype
was more successful in the market, Folio was forgotten.
(BTW: “Hell” is just a last name in Germany, which in that language
also has the meaning “light” - not “Heck”)
/hair_splitting
When I print stuff, it tends to look the same on paper as it does on screen. Can someone who studies this stuff explain briefly what I’m missing?
I wonder if those BBS numbers are still active. Let me pull out my 300 baud AppleTalk modem and my Apple ][e and dial them up.
Brings back old memories, seeing those apple screens, back in the day of the bbs scene.
Good times, good memories…
I remember back when I was in iCE doing ansi advertisements for BBSes my font skills were so bad I’d almost always have to get other people to do the font portion for me.
Sorry… I’m pretty loyal to Verdana and Georgia.
Both look VERY nice both large and small (although Verdana does lose some charm when blown up much more than about 14 pt)
I’m highly skeptical of that “Scourge of Arial” article and the claims that Microsoft chose Arial for Windows 3.1 because Arial cost less than Helvetica.
First of all, the article merely states that Microsoft chose Arial “probably because it was cheaper” – no evidence, no facts, not even any certainty. But later in the article this unsubstantiated “probable” is presented as truth, that Arial’s success “born out of the desire to avoid paying license fees”.
Second of all, to “James” who commented below on January 17, 2008 06:36 AM, how is the way Microsoft wanted to license the fonts any different from the way Apple wanted to license the fonts? Your argument that $250 per copy of Windows is too expensive (certainly it is) is unconvincing when we consider that $250 per Macintosh would also have been ridiculous: the Mac Classic was only $1000, and upgrading to System 7, which included Helvetica as a TrueType font, was only $100. So how is Helvetica too expensive for Windows 3.1 (original retail price, $150) but not for Apple System 7 ($100, or included with $1000 Mac Classic boxes after May 1991)?
I’m not saying that Microsoft didn’t choose Arial because it was cheaper, I’m just saying that nobody’s presented any valid evidence for this supposed “fact”. There are lots of other reasons Microsoft may have chosen Arial over Helvetica; maybe they had a better relationship with Monotype, maybe Monotype pushed harder to sell their stuff to Microsoft, maybe Monotype offered them a package deal on a bunch of fonts, I don’t know. Price may be a reasonable explanation, but until someone offers up some actual evidence, I’m not buying it.
For a little font fun, take the Arial or Helvetica quiz:
http://www.iliveonyourvisits.com/helvetica/#
The Coding Horror banner appears to be in Frutiger Black. Nice choice.
Trebuchet is one Microsoft font that manages to look good on both screen and paper.
I miss the old custom-made crack installers with their uber-midi techno songs.
As I remember it, Microsoft didn’t choose Helvetica because they couldn’t get an open-ended license - they would have had to pay a royalty for every copy of Windows sold, and that was unacceptable. I wish I could find the reference to back me up, but both my memory and Google are failing me today.
Quite a lot of graphic designers see Helvetica as a boring and safe choice. I even heard that some cv’s are critised for using helvetica - such a harsh world!
…but your own stylesheet says:
font-family:calibri,tahoma,arial,sans-serif
Where’s Helvetica?