ARIAL

'Arial', sometimes marketed as 'Arial MT', is a sans-serif typeface and computer font packaged with Microsoft Windows, other Microsoft software applications, Apple Mac OS X, and many PostScript computer printers. The typeface was designed in 1982 by Robin Nicholas and Patricia Saunders for Monotype Typography.
Arial is also a typeface family comprising standard Arial (Arial Std) and variants, including Arial Black, Bold, Extra Bold, Condensed, Italic, Light, Medium, Monospaced, Narrow, and Rounded.

Contents

Design characteristics

Distribution

Typographic tempest?

Arial variants

Arial Alternative

See also

References

External links

Design characteristics

Embedded in version 3.0 of the OpenType version of Arial is the following description of the typeface:

Contemporary sans serif design, Arial contains more humanist characteristics than many of its predecessors and as such is more in tune with the mood of the last decades of the twentieth century. The overall treatment of curves is softer and fuller than in most industrial style sans serif faces. Terminal strokes are cut on the diagonal which helps to give the face a less mechanical appearance. Arial is an extremely versatile family of typefaces which can be used with equal success for text setting in reports, presentations, magazines etc, and for display use in newspapers, advertising and promotions.

Though nearly identical to Linotype Helvetica in both proportion and weight (see figure), the design of Arial is in fact a variation of Monotype's Grotesque series, and was designed with computer use in mind. Subtle changes and variations have been made to both the letterforms and the spacing between characters, in order to make it more readable on screen and at various resolutions.
Arial version 2.76 or later includes Arabic glyphs that are also found in Times New Roman, which have more varied stroke widths than the Latin, Greek, Cyrillac glyphs found in the font. Arial Unicode MS uses monotone stroke widths on Arabic glyphs, similar to Tahoma.
The Cyrillac, Greek and Coptic, Spacing Modifier Letters glyphs initially introduced in Arial Unicode MS, but later available to Arial version 5.00, have different appearences.

Distribution

Arial was introduced as a TrueType font in 1990, and as a PostScript font in 1991. The TrueType edition has shipped as part of Microsoft Windows since the introduction of Windows 3.1 in 1992.
Since 1999, Microsoft Office has shipped with Arial Unicode MS, a version of Arial that includes many international characters from the Unicode standard. This version of the typeface is the most widely distributed pan-Unicode font.
PostScript does not require support for a specific set of fonts, but Arial and Helvetica are among the 40 or so typeface families that PostScript level 3 devices typically support.^[1]
Mac OS X, first released for the desktop in 2001, was the first Mac OS version to include Arial. The operating system ships with Arial, Arial Black, Arial Narrow, and Arial Rounded MT.
The inclusion of Arial with Windows has made it one of the most widely distributed and used typefaces in the world.

Typographic tempest?

Arial is held in disregard by some professional typographers and type enthusiasts, for reasons relating to its similarity to other typefaces and the involvement of Microsoft in its development and distribution.
It is reinforced by Arial's apparent status as a ''de facto'' Helvetica stand-in, but without paying royalties, or credit, to Helvetica. Many people are unable to tell the difference between Helvetica, Arial and other similar fonts; and most Postscript printers will by default substitute Arial with Helvetica. There are a number of fonts which are direct copies of Helvetica that different printer companies have created, these include Triumvirate, Helios, Megaron, and Newton.^[2]
Arial's glyph widths are nearly identical to those of Helvetica, rather than Monotype Grotesque, on which Arial is otherwise based.
Although much attention is given to the perceived relationship between Arial and Helvetica, where Arial differs most strikingly from Helvetica, it is actually very similar to Univers — examples include the angled tail of the "1", the absence of a tail on the "G", and the angled top of the "t".

Arial variants

Many typefaces are named Arial, here are the known variations:

★ Arial: Sometimes called ''Arial Regular'' to distinguish its width from Arial Narrow, it contains Arial (roman text weight), Arial Italic, Arial Bold, Arial Bold Italic, and Arial Unicode MS

★ Arial Black: Arial Black, Arial Black Italic. This weight is known for being particularly heavy. This is because the face was originally drawn as a bitmap, and to increase the weight, stroke widths for bold went from a single pixel width to two pixels in width.

★ Arial Narrow: Arial Narrow Regular, Arial Narrow Bold, Arial Narrow Italic, Arial Narrow Bold Italic. This family is a condensed version.

★ Arial Rounded: Arial Rounded Bold. The regular versions of the rounded glyphs can be found in Gulim, Microsoft's Korean font set.

Arial Alternative

Arial Alternative Regular and Arial Alternative Symbol are standard fonts in Windows ME, and can also be found in Windows 95 and Windows XP's installation CD. Both fonts are Symbol-encoded. These fonts emulate the monospaced font used in Minitel/Prestel teletext systems, but vectorized with Arial styling.
Arial Alternative Regular contains only ASCII characters, while Arial Alternative Symbol contains only 2x3 braille characters.

See also

★ Core fonts for the Web

References

1. ''PLR3 Supplement'', appendix D (1999) and ''The Adobe PostScript 3 font set''; accessed April 29, 2006.
2. Mark Simonson:

★ The Scourge of Arial

★ How to Spot Arial: differences between Arial, Helvetica, and Grotesque 215
The origins and distinguishing characteristics of Arial and its predecessors, accessed on 2006-04-29.

''Note: while Mark Simonson dislikes Arial, this is mostly based on its history and some features he considers "out of place" because they are not the same as in other Grotesque fonts.''

External links

★ Arial font information (Microsoft typography)

★ Arial Black font information (Microsoft typography)

★ Downloadable version of Arial (Web core fonts)

★ Downloadable version of Arial Black (Web core fonts)

★ Helvetica vs. Arial, a Flash-based game

★ A Hate-On for Arial (photo gallery)