The most popular font on the web, Arial - in wide adoption owing to Microsoft Windows - has a shady history behind it. [As Mr. Mackey would say "Arial is bad, mkay?"]Helvetica is the original chic; it stands an icon of swiss design and elegance. A font 10 years into India's freedom. It was chosen as one of the base fonts for Adobe's Postscript, and became the standard for much of print media. Trust me, the font is legendary!
All this time I had assumed I had Helvetica on my system. Firing up MSWord07 confirmed that, Helvetica was listed among my installed fonts. At the same time I also decided to check out the differences between either fonts (Helvetica vs Arial), to immediately condition myself to abhor the Helvetica clone. But on blowing up the fonts, I found that they were the exact same - no graceful curls as in the real Helvetica, or the poise in the letters R, G, C...
So finally the followings were done
- Visiting my fonts folder
- Firing up Adobe Photoshop to see the list of available fonts
- Using the fonts side-by-side on an HTML page
And it was confirmed I DID NOT have Helvetica. I have spent my lifetime not appropriately knowing or using Helvetica!
This fact also brought forth that Helvetica is still a licensed font, and it costs INR 1450. Even if people don't buy into the uber-coolness of the font, they would still get it for the association and conformity/exclusivity the font brings.
Why did MS Word 2007 show that Helvetica was installed? This might be because certain printers have this font embedded into their hardware; hence if your system lacks this font, you can still have it in print.
Two fonts walk into the bar, and the barman says, "sorry lads, we don't serve your type".
