Improve the typography on your Mac in 5 seconds.

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!

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