It is considered as the most legible version, due to the enlarged space between numbers and the bigger punctuation marks. Neue Helvetica (New Helvetica), a modern 1983 version with unified character width and height.It can be used only in its black and bold version (oblique and condensed included) and has an outline version that was never available online. Helvetica Rounded, designed in 1978, which comprises of rounded stroke terminators.Helvetica Textbook, a product of altering characters to for informal design.Mathew Carter’s Helvetica Compressed, quite similar with Helvetica Inserat, but still not identical.Stempel’s Helvetica Light designed by Arthur Ritzel and artistic director Erich Schultz-Anker.The alphabet was not the only distinguishing criterion, and Helvetica soon evolved to: Helvetica varied many times, as a result of which there are multiple types and variants available (Korean, Hindi, Cyrillic, Japanese, Vietnamese, Greek, and many others). The era of modern industry was starting, and communication had to be clean and fast! Helvetica Variations & Types While modern architecture was slowly stripping away superfluous architecture, Swiss typography followed and snipped off stone-carved and frivolous serifs. It appeared in 1956, created deliberately by Eduard Hoffman and Max Miedinger to cherish the new Swiss Style, giving it extraordinary importance, almost as it was a postwar utopian mission. The typeface is currently used in many modern operating systems and other electronic displays. Since then it has been modified into a range of languages and variations. Helvetica has become one of the most popular fonts in the world. Let’s check what makes it so powerful, and see whether you should use it in your upcoming design projects: History of HelveticaĪs one could conclude by the name, Helvetica has Swiss origins (at first, it was called Neue Haas Grotesk, even if that probably sounds like a 1980s German factory instead of a font). You may not really see it, but Helvetica is there – it is on all products, websites, packages, or reading papers.
The font is so popular that there is a book and a documentary movie about it.īut how does it come? How can this simple and inconspicuous font be everywhere around us? New York’s MOMA also featured Helvetica, and the typeface won multiple awards and recognition because of it. Other sectors where Helvetica is highly popular are fashion (the iconic Helvetica T-shirt writing saying ‘I hate Helvetica’) and tech producers (Intel, Apple, Microsoft, etc.). Nowadays, the Helvetica font family can be described as ubiquitous, which is why it spells so many important brands (Nestle, Lufthansa, American Apparel, etc.). Observed from the technical aspect, Helvetica is originally a sans serif typeface, the ancestor of Berthold’s 1898 Akzidenz-Grotesk typeface. This setting is called Font Embed in the Power PDF Create Assistant settings under profiles.Helvetica is definitively (as font geeks with a repulsive turn of phrases like to say) one of the most popular fonts of our time.
Most PDF applications have an override like Power PDF on Windows to allow a create of a PDF to override the default Embed Non-Standard Fonts and Embed all Fonts when a PDF is saved. The closest font to that on a Windows system will be Arial so that is what will be used.
Helvetica does not exist on Windows by default, so when a Mac generated PDF is opened on a Windows machine and conversion is done, it will replace Helvetica with something else. Helvetica is a standard font on the Mac, equivalent of Arial.
Helvetica (regular, oblique, bold and bold oblique) Times (regular, italic, bold, and bold italic)Ĭourier (regular, oblique, bold and bold oblique)
These are the fonts that are not embedded by default: The assumption was that these are standard fonts and everyone already has them on their computer. There are five (5) standard fonts in PDF that are not embedded by PDF applications by default.