Improve the typography on your Mac in 5 seconds.
by Richard Bradshaw
As you are surely aware, Microsoft ripped off Helvetica to create the Arial font. It’s not as nice, and doesn’t look nice on screen at all. The image below shows some of the differences.
As you can see, the ends of each letter aren’t lined up properly, they are all at weird angles.
Though Helvetica is the superior font, many sites specify that they should use Arial preferentially to Helvetica. This seems to be a throwback from Dreamweaver, which defines it’s default font stack as Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif. As Arial comes with Macs, no one will get the Helvetica in this situation.
Luckily, on your Mac there is an easy fix to rid websites of Arial – just open Fontbook, disable Arial and restart your web browser. Arial no more, Helvetica is back!
Comments
There is one BIG problem with your “solution”. If Arial is disabled, many programs search your computer for it, giving long spinning cursor waits.
I must admit I haven't seen that yet – I had considered symlinking it to Helvetica, but Arial is a ttf whilst Helvetica is a dfont so I couldn't think of a way to do it.
I know that MS Office uses Arial, but I don't have it so haven't seen that issue.