BBC Advocates use of Arial | Hacker News Reader

BBC Advocates use of Arial

bbc.co.uk

3 pointsdmerfield5 comments

I understand Gill Sans (isn't it the London underground font?), which isn't quite common on Windows machines. So it seems to be Arial/Gill instead of the usual Arial/Helvetica combo…

Boring, but workable. Yeah, I know, Arial bad, Helvetica good! -- never got any part of that argument. Both are quite boring Grotesques… (Still waiting for a high-dpi monitor that can finally end the reign of the sans serifs)

Arial is "bad" because it's a clone of Helvetica. When MS created Windows, they didnt want to pay to license Helvetica so they made their own copy of it. Yeah, I know, under-handed move, but fonts are really expensive. $800 for the entire typeface--you have to buy italic and bold separately because they're technically different fonts. In the design world, typeface piracy is as big as Photoshop piracy.

Apple, OTOH, properly licenses Helvetica.

Sorry, but that's simply wrong, both from a legal and typographical perspective. Arial wasn't made by or for Microsoft, but by Monotype. I'd assume that licensing it was cheaper than Helvetica, or that you'd get a better deal if you buy everything at one foundry.

And whether it's a straight clone can be argued, too. Basically it's to Monotype Grotesque like Helvetica is to Akzidenz Grotesk. It's a bit too close to comfort for some designers, but there are lots of fonts in that design space that aren't that different (one of the problem with grotesques). The shapes of the glyphs don't match, but the general footprint is the same so that you easily substitute Arial for Helvetica and won't change the flow of the text. By the way, this is basically the raison d'être for Liberation Sans, which shares the same metrics.

Also, if it were a straight carbon copy, designers wouldn't complain about the ugly looks of Arial as compared to Helvetica. Which I never quite got myself, but then again, I'm not Helvetica's biggest fan.

I have never heard about the 'usual Arial/Helvetica combo'.

Not as two seperate fonts, of course, I meant that they're usually used together when you specify the font family in CSS, i.e. "font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif".

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