Is there a way to add Helvetica to Microsoft Word?
Apparently not for free. A minute or two of Googling turned up no free versions (under that name) but several sources of paid downloads. You could probably find a package that contains Helvetica and many other faces for a reasonable price.
Of course, Arial is essentially identical to Helvetica, as far as all but the most persnickety graphic designers can tell.
Thanks. I did a bit more research myself and Microsoft Sans Serif is also very similar.
Ok, dumb question. . . my version of MS Word has several variants of Helvetica that it came with (in addition to Ariel). Is that because it’s for Mac or something, and the Windows version doesn’t have it for some reason?
I’m using Word 2000 for Windows and it has Helvetica. Although some of the letters don’t look exactly Helvetica. The top of the lower case “t”, for example, is distinctly diagonal. I’m not sure what to make of that.
You can have mine. I detest Helvetica, almost as much as Times.
Anyway, if you MUST use Helvetica, use Arial instead; you probably have it, and it has a better cap R.
The Helvetica font that some people see in windows is supplied by the printer that they use - the screen font is actually rendered in Arial (as the nearest equivalent display font) using the printer driver statistics, but is printed using the native printer supplied font.
Most printers now do not supply internal fonts - they use the same rendering engine as the display, and use MS supplied Truetype or Bitmapped fonts. But in the early days of printing, fonts were installed on the physical printer. The printer driver reported the available printer fonts (along with appropriate font stats) to Windows, which added them to the font selection dialog. When rendering a printer font on screen, Windows selected the closest available display font, and adapted the parameters to match the printer definition (sometimes less successfully than more - what you saw approximated what you got). This is still a feature of postscript printer drivers, which use a generic postscript engine with a customising PPD file to tell the OS about the specific features and fonts installed on the printer.
If you want Helvetica (and don’t have a postscript printer with it installed), you need to purchase a TrueType font.
Si
You can end up with a wide range of fonts just by installing certain kinds of software, that may require, or conveniently provide, different fonts it needs to display correctly. These get placed in your Fonts directory, and will most likely be made available in all applications that offer choices of fonts to use, such as word processors and graphics software.
Yes. Helvetica is a Mac OS system font.