Arial, Helvetica
Post from February 12, 2009 (ā» August 27, 2021), filed under Web Development.
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An extension of my post on Arial and Helvetica: For those who want or have to use Arial as their standard font, there is no point in mentioning Helvetica anywhere in the code, as in arial, helvetica, sans-serif
.
Arial is so popular that Helveticaās almost never used. There isnāt a single test case to indicate else. arial, sans-serif
is enough. No need for ten additional characters. There never has been when Arial came first in a font list.
As many people know, Arial is not only available on almost any Windows system, it ships with Mac OS since at least 10.3, if not 10.0, and it ships with several Linux distributions, too, at least do numbers suggest so. In that respect Arial, the āscourge,ā has won, years ago. We gotta give it that, in our font declarations.
About Me

Iām Jens Oliver Meiert, and Iām an engineering manager and author. Iāve worked as a technical lead for Google, Iām close to the W3C and the WHATWG, and I write and review books for OāReilly. Other than that, I love trying things, sometimes including philosophy, art, and adventure. Here on meiert.com I share some of my views and experiences.
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Comments (Closed)
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On February 12, 2009, 11:35 CET, Andrei Eftimie said:
You got it backwards. It should be:
Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
Isnāt it better to use Helvetica when it is available, and Arial when it isnāt?
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On February 12, 2009, 11:38 CET, Jens Oliver Meiert said:
Andrei, good that youāre asking nowāI already talked about Helvetica and Arial in a former post (where I suggested to prefer Helvetica). This time itās about the case where you want to use Arial (no matter why). I hope that makes it a bit clearer.
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On February 12, 2009, 12:14 CET, Harry Roberts said:
@Andrei:
Only if itās for headings. Never use Helvetica for body copy, cos for us PC users it looks terrible š -
On February 12, 2009, 12:20 CET, Kroc Camen said:
On the subject of Helvetica, Iād add to what Adrei said with:
āHelvetica Neueā, Helvetica, sans-serif
Helvetica Neue is a version of Helvetica on OS X designed for screen reading and gives much crisper text in small sizes. No need to use it for titles or stuff.
Also, another handy tip:
Donāt specify āCourier Newā directly for code samples. Itās thin and gangly in OS X, and Courier is better. The problem though is that Courier on Windows is a bitmap font and looks very bad. So how do you specify Courier for OS X, but Courier New for Windows in one declaration?Simple:
font-family: monospace;(or just ‘monospaceā in your font: attribute). OS X uses Courier, and Windows uses Courier New. Crisp fonts for all.
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On February 12, 2009, 14:12 CET, philippe said:
Ditto what Kroc Camen said.
‘Helvetica Neueā, Arial, sans-serif.
Arial looks very poor on OS X, worse at those mouse-type sizes some designers seem to love. And both fonts have very similar aspect-ratio.
BTW, my pretty much stock install of Ubuntu 810 doesnāt have Arial. I know I can add it, but Iām uninterested.But I see your point about shaving a few bytes in your stylesheet.
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On February 13, 2009, 4:57 CET, Ben Buchanan said:
Itās such a pity that Helvetica looks so bad on some PCs. Ruins it for everyone.
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On February 19, 2009, 15:42 CET, gareth hunt said:
The āHelvetica Neueā, [ā¦] declaration looks terrible on PCs. A lot of ābig namesā use it, and it must look great on Mac OS, but I have to get firebug out and remove reference to Helvetica Neue if I want to have a readable experience on their sites.
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