The Helvetica Neue font that I installed for my presentation is very poorly hinted (if at all) at small sizes like the one's being used. However, Helvetica is super common font that is mentioned in Stylesheets - often explicitly when CSS is designed on a Mac - and Arial on Windows usually steps in as the replacement on Windows. It's a lovely font and I think it worked nicely for my talk and looked great in PowerPoint. Well, what's changed is that I gave a talk at Xamarin Evolve this week, and in preparation, installed Helvetica Neue. What's going on here? What's changed? Doesn't it seem like "What's changed?" is the question we engineer-types ask the most? I also happened to be at the Xamarin Evolve conference this week, so I mentioned it to the team down there, thinking they could pick another font.įast forward, and I'm on the plane, checking my email with Gmail Offline (the HTML5 offline version of Gmail) and noticed this. In fact, Jin Yang ( had to abandon Montserrat, our Web Font of choice, for a more conservative one whilst doing the redesign due to Google Chrome's poor font rendering on Windows. I emailed and mentally blamed Google Chrome as it's well know they've been having trouble with their Web Font rendering of late. The hinting is OK, but the font is somehow "wrong." Note the subtle"bites" that have been taken out of the g and s, but the c is OK. Way down in the bowels of the Windows Registry is HCLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\ NTCurrentVersion\FontSubstitutes which lists the substitutions.A few days ago, I visited the website and noticed this. It drives web designers crazy, especially since CSS has a way to choose from a family of preferred fonts. Most web browsers get the same thing – web pages that ask for ‘Helvetica’ to display in web page will get the Arial font instead. This happens at the Windows level and doesn’t just apply to Microsoft Office.
Windows is setup to use Arial whenever it sees a reference to ‘Helvetica’. It’s not too much to ask that users are told when and what font substitution is done.
Alas, Microsoft’s implementation lacks transparency or clarity for anyone who needs the exact font used. The idea of font substitution is a good one. You can change the font substitution for an individual document on the Word dialog shown above by choosing another font.
The default substitution for ‘Helvetica’ is ‘Arial’ It’s a sneaky way to substitute a popular font while obscuring the truth. In fact ,it’s quite wrong and misleading. We can see that ‘Helvetica Neue’ is substituted with ‘Malgun Gothic’ – no problem there.Īccording to Word the substitution for ‘Helvetica’ is ‘Helvetica’ or ‘Default’ depending on which part of the dialog box you read! That doesn’t make any sense on several levels.
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