In the staff report Why is “CH” the abbreviation for Switzerland?, Arnold Winkelried writes
Two questions regarding this:
Have you a printer? Most laser printers supply Helvetica. All PostScript printers, at any rate, supply:[ul]
[li]Courier (plain, italic, bold, & bold italic),[/li][li]Helvetica (plain, italic, bold, & bold italic),[/li][li]Helvetica Black (bold & bold italic),[/li][li]Helvetica Light (plain & italic),[/li][li]Helvetica Narrow (plain, italic, bold, & bold italic),[/li][li]Times New Roman (plain, italic, bold, & bold italic),[/li][li]SymbolSet,[/li][li]ITC Avant Garde Gothic (plain, italic, bold, & bold italic),[/li][li]ITC Bookman (plain, italic, bold, & bold italic),[/li][li]ITC Zapf Chancery, [/li][li]ITC Zapf Dingbats,[/li][li]Century Schoolbook (plain, italic, bold, & bold italic), and[/li][li]Palatino (plain, italic, bold, and bold italic).[/li][/ul]
They are not the “same” font at all. Corel packages a version of Helvetica called “Swiss,” and “Switzerland,” depending on which version of Corel Draw. Arial would rarely be used by anyone in the graphics field. shudder I can’t imagine anyone using it, anyway. :rolleyes:
Adobe owns the rights to Helvetica. During the Truetype/Post-Script font wars of the late 80s and early 90s, Microsoft got the rights to a Helvetica clone, Arial. Arial is slightly different.
As already mentioned, Arial is not neccessarily a clone of Helvetica. But it could have been if they wanted it to be. To take an existing font, rename it, call it your own, and even sell it to others is a fairly common practice amongst font publishers. Bitstream, a major font publisher has done this too… They called their version “Swiss 721.”
You may be thinking, “Waitaminuite! I thought fonts are copyrighted. How can this be legal?”
There are two things to consider here:
(1) the design of the individual letterforms at various weights, and
(2) the licensing of the resulting collection under a particular name.
Microsoft et al can copy the exact geometry of existing letterform designs and repackage them under another name completely legally. I don’t know for certain why this particular form of artwork isn’t protected the way other artwork is, but I would guess that already in the centuries of typeface development, there have been so many typefaces developed that have such slight variations between one another, that it would be impossible for a person to copyright a style ("Hey! That’s totally how I cross my ‘t’! You ripped me off!). Naturally, this would be expected with a type classification like “sanserif” (which Helvetica is a prime example of) but one would imagine that some of the newer funkier “display” types are unique enough to say "Clearly, that is a rip-off of the typeface “Banana Peel.” But the problem is: these are all typefaces. Where does one draw the line? Again, I’m not the final authority on this, but I think it is a case of a horrible can of worms that no one wants to open.
The portion of a font that is protected under copyright law is the actual digital files from the type publisher. For instance, I can purchase 1 copy of “Adobe Garamond” for my workstation. But if I copy those files to my co-worker’s workstation, I am in violation. Technically, I would have to purchase another copy of it (though in my experience, people violate this on a regular basis also. It’s highly difficult to police.) Technically, it’s not even neccessarily lawful for me to make copies to send along with my design to a commercial printer who will output the piece (though again, some/most publishers include those rights along with the license.) It’s worth noting, of course that some font publishers like Chank (www.chank.com) publishes a series that is completely copyright free.
Clear as mud? Be thankful you didn’t ask anything about discrepancies amongst font rendering technologies PostScript, TrueType and OpenType.
I worked for a typeface software company (since absorbed by HP) around the time Arial was created, and the typographers I worked with knew some of the parties involved. This is my recollection of the basic story, but I may have some small details incorrect.
As mentioned by others, Arial is not a precise clone of Helvetica, though it is certainly similar and was designed to be in the same style. It was created by Monotype under contract for Microsoft, along with Courier New and Times New Roman, specifically so Microsoft could have a set of royalty-free typefaces that were not encumbered in any way. Microsoft specifically directed that they be new typefaces in the style of the core Postscript typefaces, but not exact clones. Monotype put a huge amount of work into them, and I gathered that the typographers involved felt that they were improvements on the Adobe/Linotype Times and Helvetica.
Certainly they have some of the best hinting of any TrueType typefaces, or at least they did at the time. (Hinting is a way of telling the typeface scaling engine how to produce better-looking output with small numbers of pixels, as for screen display). The hinting programs were hand-tweaked to get good readable output at all normal screen resolutions. Compare Times New Roman at 8 point on a 72 dpi screen to some other Times Roman; in most cases Times New Roman will look better. Most other typefaces just aren’t hinted as well.
One unfortunate side effect of Microsoft’s desire to create all-new typefaces is that the character widths are slightly different from the Adobe/Linotype fonts. Thus if you create a document using Adobe Helevetica then open it on a PC that doesn’t have Helvetica, Arial will be substituted, which will often cause all the text in the document to reflow, in some cases screwing up the careful formatting.
Still, I would take issue with the idea that Arial and Times New Roman are inferior typefaces. They are, in fact, just as good as Helvetica and Times Roman, and perfectly fine to use in professional work. It’s certainly true that graphic designers turn up their noses at them, but largely because they assume that anything from Microsoft must be crap. In this particular case, it isn’t so.
Don
IMHO, Arial looks more like “computer lettering” while Helvetica looks more “arty.” So I use either depending on the context. Neither is absolutely better than the other.
But Microsoft (via the type foundry) did deliberately copy a style invented by someone else.
Thanks for a very informative post, dmunsil, and welcome to the boards!
I’d like to congratulate Arnold on his first Staff Report, and express the hope that we see many more from him!
It was a fine column, Arnold Winkelried. I learned several things I never even suspected. For example, I thought “to Helvetia!” was a dismissive epithet. Now I know it means “toward Switzerland!” 
I don’t quite see what makes Arial look like “computer lettering.” To me, you have to go to some of the weird display faces that look like LCD segments or the numbers at the bottom of checks to get a “computer” look. But it’s all in the eye of the beholder.
There’s a web page that goes over the differences between the two:
http://www.ms-studio.com/articlesarialsid.html
It was written by someone who seems to hate Arial, I think out of sheer type snobbery. Personally, I like the Arial letterforms a tad better in most cases. I think the Arial capital G fits the face better than the Helvetica G, which has a superfluous serif-like beard on it. But really, it’s potayto, potahto. They’re both excellent sans-serif faces and quite practical.
Hmm…you know, that’s a controversial opinion. For one thing, in many cases tracking down the real “original” typeface is difficult, so one foundry’s claim to be the originator may be tricky to substantiate. For another, there is no type foundry of any significant size that has not “cloned” another type foundry’s work, so no one has the moral high ground.
As that web page points out, Arial is based on Grotesque 215, which is similar to Helvetica, but not that similar. There are only so many ways to make a medium-weight non-geometric sans-serif. Grotesque is a Monotype original and dates back to 1915, which is well before Helvetica, which was created in the 1950s. And they’re both based on much older sans-serif typefaces.
I was wrong in my earlier posting – Monotype Times New Roman is the original typeface, cut for the Times of London by Monotype. Linotype Times Roman is the “knockoff” (though they did get a license for it). Here’s a web page where Chuck Bigelow details the whole history of Times Roman vs. Times New Roman:
http://www.truetype.demon.co.uk/articles/times.htm
As I worked in the type industry for a while, I found that there were tons of situations like this, where what appeared to be a knockoff was actually a reworking of a classic typeface, or a typeface that was originated by one foundry was reworked into something much more popular by another foundry.
Now, when someone modern like Hermann Zapf or Chuck Bigelow creates a distinctive new face and all the other foundries scramble to make one almost exactly like it, that’s pretty obviously “knocking off” a face. But when it comes to fonts that have been around forever like Times or Garamond, things aren’t so clear.
As I recall, in the type biz folks were quite surprised that Microsoft spent the time and money to go to a serious foundry like Monotype and get a “real” typeface made that would match Helvetica and Times Roman’s widths. Legally speaking, they could have had anyone clone Helvetica and Times Roman, but they wanted to do the right thing. Take it for what it’s worth.
Don
I don’t have Win2K, but I’ve never seen Helvetica installed by MS as part of any other OS, before or since.
More likely yours came as part of some other software, some DTP package perhaps?
dmunsil,
The reasons **this ** graphic designer has a low opinion of Microsoft’s type has nothing to do with the design of the letterforms themselves. There is little “better” or “worse” when it comes to type selection… it is primarily a matter of taste and appropriateness for the project at hand.
That being said, Microsoft-created type is usually low on my selection list because (1) they are so closely associated with type-rendering technology (TrueType as opposed to PostScript) that is frowned upon by commerical printers; and (2) these fonts are most commonly seen used by programs that handle type horribly, namely Word and PowerPoint. These programs can’t match the level of type control that we get from just about any layout program (That’s not a jab at Word and PowerPoint, they’re not created to offer high-level typography, it’s probably not a request that those program’s users need the most…fine.)
It’s not a reflection on the equisite letterforms themselves, it’s that they’re associated with technology that doesn’t synch well in the world the designers need to work.
Interesting being branded as a “type snob” by someone who they themselves talk about "Helvetica’s superfluous serif-like beard.
In my defensiveness, I forgot to mention my original thought…
To put the matter in perspective, Helvetica itself (designed in the mid-1950’s) is an “update” of a typeface from the turn of the century called Akzidenz Grotesk (or “Standard” as it was known in the U.S.)