Arial
Encyclopedia
Arial, sometimes marketed or displayed in software as Arial MT, is a sans-serif
typeface
and set of computer font
s. Fonts from the Arial family are packaged with Microsoft Windows
, some other Microsoft
software
applications, Apple
Mac OS X
and many PostScript
3 computer printer
s. The typeface was designed in 1982 by a 10-person team, led by Robin Nicholas and Patricia Saunders, for Monotype Typography
.
The Arial typeface comprises many styles: Regular, Italic, Medium, Medium Italic, Bold, Bold Italic, Black, Black Italic, Extra Bold, Extra Bold Italic, Light, Light Italic, Narrow, Narrow Italic, Narrow Bold, Narrow Bold Italic, Condensed, Light Condensed, Bold Condensed, and Extra Bold Condensed. The extended Arial type family includes even more styles: Rounded (Light, Regular, Bold, Extra Bold); Monospaced (Regular, Oblique, Bold, Bold Oblique). Many of these have been issued in multiple font configurations with different degrees of language support. The most widely used and bundled Arial fonts are Arial Regular, Italic, Bold, Bold Italic, along with the same styles of Arial Narrow, plus Arial Black and Black Italic. More recently Arial Rounded has also been widely bundled.
version of Arial is the following description of the typeface:
In 2005, Robin Nicholas said "It was designed as a generic sans serif; almost a bland sans serif."
The letter shapes of Arial are based on Monotype Grotesque
. Subtle changes and variations were made to both the letterforms and the spacing between characters in order to make it more readable at various resolutions.
The changes cause the typeface to nearly match Linotype Helvetica
in both proportion and weight (see figure), and perfectly match in width. Nevertheless, there are differences. One columnist observed "Arial was drawn more rounded than [Helvetica], the curves softer and fuller and the counters more open. The ends of the strokes on letters such as c, e, g and s, rather than being cut off on the horizontal, are terminated at the more natural angle in relation to the stroke direction."
The styling of Arabic glyphs comes from Times New Roman, which have more varied stroke widths than the Latin, Greek
, Cyrillic glyphs found in the font. Arial Unicode MS
uses monotone stroke widths on Arabic glyphs
, similar to Tahoma
.
The Cyrillic, Greek and Coptic
Spacing Modifier Letters glyphs initially introduced in Arial Unicode MS, but later debuted in Arial version 5.00, have different appearances.
debuted two printers for the in-office publishing market in 1982: the 240-DPI
3800-3 laserxerographic printer
, and the 600-DPI 4250 electro-erosion laminate typesetter.
IBM named the font Sonoran Sans Serif due to licensing restrictions and the manufacturing facility's location (Tucson, Arizona
, in the Sonoran Desert
), and announced in early 1984 that the Sonoran Sans Serif family, "a functional equivalent of Monotype Arial," would be available for licensed use in the 3800-3 by the fourth quarter of 1984. There were initially 14 point
sizes, ranging from 6 to 36, and four style/weight combinations (Roman medium, Roman bold, italic medium, and italic bold), for a total of 56 fonts in the family. Each contained 238 graphic characters, providing support for eleven national languages: Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish. Monotype and IBM later expanded the family to include 300-DPI bitmaps and characters for additional languages.
In 1989, Monotype produced PostScript Type 1
outline versions of several Monotype fonts, but an official PostScript version of Arial was not available until 1991. In the meantime, a company called Birmy marketed a version of Arial in a Type 1-compatible format.
In 1990, Robin Nicholas, Patricia Saunders and Steve Matteson
developed a TrueType
outline version of Arial which was licensed to Microsoft.
In 1992, Microsoft chose Arial to be one of the four core TrueType fonts in Windows 3.1, announcing the font as an "alternative to Helvetica".
Version 5.00 added support for Latin-C and Latin D, IPA Extension, Greek Extended, Cyrillic Supplement, and Coptic characters.
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.
Arial MT, a PostScript version of the Arial font family, was distributed with Acrobat Reader
4 and 5.
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.
Mac OS X
was the first Mac OS
version to include Arial. The operating system ships with Arial, Arial Black, Arial Narrow, and Arial Rounded MT. However, the default Mac OS X font for sans-serif/Swiss generic font family is Helvetica.
The inclusion of Arial with Windows and Mac OS has contributed to it being one of the most widely distributed and used typefaces in the world.
, and can also be found in Windows 95
and Windows XP
's installation CD, or in Microsoft's site. Both fonts are Symbol-encoded. These fonts emulate the monospaced font used in Minitel
/Prestel
teletext
systems, but vectorized with Arial styling. The fonts are used by HyperTerminal.
Arial Alternative Regular contains only ASCII characters, while Arial Alternative Symbol contains only 2x3 braille
characters.
In addition, Monotype also sells Arial in reduced character sets, such as Arial CE, Arial WGL, Arial Cyrillic, Arial Greek, Arial Hebrew, Arial Thai.
Arial Unicode is a version supporting all characters assigned with Unicode 2.1 code points.
Version sold by Linotype includes Arial Rounded, Arial Monospaced, Arial Condensed, Arial Central European, Arial Central European Narrow, Arial Cyrillic, Arial Cyrillic Narrow, Arial Dual Greek, Arial Dual Greek Narrow, Arial SF, Arial Turkish, Arial Turkish Narrow.
In addition, Monotype also sells Arial in reduced character sets, such as Arial CE, Arial WGL, Arial Cyrillic, Arial Greek, Arial Hebrew, Arial Thai, Arial SF.
The family includes Arial (regular, bold, italics), Arial Black, Arial Narrow (regular, bold, italics), Arial Rounded (regular, bold).
stand-in, but without paying royalties, or credit, to Helvetica. Arial's glyph widths are nearly identical to those of Helvetica, rather than Monotype Grotesque, on which Arial is otherwise based, and many people are unable to tell the difference between Helvetica, Arial and other similar fonts. "But to an experienced designer," writes typographer Mark Simonson, using Arial "was like asking for Jimmy Stewart and getting Rich Little
." At the same time, there are a number of fonts which are direct copies of Helvetica that several type manufacturers have created, including Triumvirate, Helios, Megaron, and Newton.
In 2005, Robin Nicholas was asked, before bringing up the subject of Arial, how far he would compromise his artistic principles for money. Nicholas responded that he would never just recreate an existing font, and the only areas where he would take a stand are "those where there would be legal problems; somebody wanting us to make a typeface that's clearly a corruption of somebody else's typeface."
According to the Arial font license, users are not allowed to modify, alter, translate, convert, or otherwise change the computer font, or to create derivative works from it or any portion thereof. They are also not allowed to rent, lease, sublicense, give, lend, or further distribute the computer font, or any copy thereof, without purchasing a license.
Core fonts for the Web
was a project begun by Microsoft in 1996 to make a standard pack of fonts for the Internet. Arial computer font in TrueType format was included in this project. It allowed anyone to download and install these fonts for their own use (on end user's computers) without any fee. The project was terminated by Microsoft in August 2002, allegedly due to frequent EULA violations. For MS Windows, the core fonts for the web were provided as self-extracting executables (.exe); each included an embedded cabinet
file, which can be extracted with appropriate software. For the Macintosh, the files were provided as BinHex
ed StuffIt
archives (.sit.hqx). The latest font version that was available from Core fonts for the Web was 2.82, published in 2000. Later versions (such as version 3 or version 5 which include many new characters) were not available from this project. A Microsoft spokesman declared in 2002 that members of the open source community "will have to find different sources for updated fonts. ... Although the EULA did not restrict the fonts to just Windows and Mac OS, they were only ever available as Windows .exe's and Mac archive files." The chief technical officer of Opera Software cited the cancellation of the project as an example of Microsoft resisting interoperability.
It is not allowed to rename, edit or create any derivative works from the executables (arial32.exe) or archives (Arial.sit.hqx) from the Core fonts for the Web project, other than subsetting when embedding them in documents. Copies of the executables or archives from this project may not be distributed for profit either on a standalone basis or included as part of other product. It is allowed to reproduce and distribute an unlimited number of copies of the executables and archives from the Core fonts for the Web project; provided that each copy shall be a true and complete copy, including all copyright and trademark notices, and shall be accompanied by a copy of EULA.
metric-compatible fonts used as free Arial alternatives or used for Arial font substitution
:
:Category:Monotype typefaces – typefaces owned by or designed for Monotype Imaging
Sans-serif
In typography, a sans-serif, sans serif or san serif typeface is one that does not have the small projecting features called "serifs" at the end of strokes. The term comes from the French word sans, meaning "without"....
typeface
Typeface
In typography, a typeface is the artistic representation or interpretation of characters; it is the way the type looks. Each type is designed and there are thousands of different typefaces in existence, with new ones being developed constantly....
and set of computer font
Computer font
A computer font is an electronic data file containing a set of glyphs, characters, or symbols such as dingbats. Although the term font first referred to a set of metal type sorts in one style and size, since the 1990s it is generally used to refer to a scalable set of digital shapes that may be...
s. Fonts from the Arial family are packaged with Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
, some other Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
software
Computer software
Computer software, or just software, is a collection of computer programs and related data that provide the instructions for telling a computer what to do and how to do it....
applications, Apple
Apple Computer
Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation that designs and markets consumer electronics, computer software, and personal computers. The company's best-known hardware products include the Macintosh line of computers, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad...
Mac OS X
Mac OS X
Mac OS X is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems...
and many PostScript
PostScript
PostScript is a dynamically typed concatenative programming language created by John Warnock and Charles Geschke in 1982. It is best known for its use as a page description language in the electronic and desktop publishing areas. Adobe PostScript 3 is also the worldwide printing and imaging...
3 computer printer
Computer printer
In computing, a printer is a peripheral which produces a text or graphics of documents stored in electronic form, usually on physical print media such as paper or transparencies. Many printers are primarily used as local peripherals, and are attached by a printer cable or, in most new printers, a...
s. The typeface was designed in 1982 by a 10-person team, led by Robin Nicholas and Patricia Saunders, for Monotype Typography
Monotype Corporation
Monotype Imaging Holdings is a Delaware corporation based in Woburn, Massachusetts and specializing in typesetting and typeface design as well as text and imaging solutions for use with consumer electronics devices. Monotype Imaging Holdings is the owner of Monotype Imaging Inc., Linotype,...
.
The Arial typeface comprises many styles: Regular, Italic, Medium, Medium Italic, Bold, Bold Italic, Black, Black Italic, Extra Bold, Extra Bold Italic, Light, Light Italic, Narrow, Narrow Italic, Narrow Bold, Narrow Bold Italic, Condensed, Light Condensed, Bold Condensed, and Extra Bold Condensed. The extended Arial type family includes even more styles: Rounded (Light, Regular, Bold, Extra Bold); Monospaced (Regular, Oblique, Bold, Bold Oblique). Many of these have been issued in multiple font configurations with different degrees of language support. The most widely used and bundled Arial fonts are Arial Regular, Italic, Bold, Bold Italic, along with the same styles of Arial Narrow, plus Arial Black and Black Italic. More recently Arial Rounded has also been widely bundled.
Design characteristics
Embedded in version 3.0 of the OpenTypeOpenType
OpenType is a format for scalable computer fonts. It was built on its predecessor TrueType, retaining TrueType's basic structure and adding many intricate data structures for prescribing typographic behavior...
version of Arial is the following description of the typeface:
In 2005, Robin Nicholas said "It was designed as a generic sans serif; almost a bland sans serif."
The letter shapes of Arial are based on Monotype Grotesque
Monotype Grotesque
Monotype Grotesque is a realist sans-serif typeface designed by Frank Hinman Pierpont and released by the Monotype foundry in 1926.Pierpont based his design for Monotype Grotesque on Ideal, an earlier more idiosyncratic sans-serif by the H...
. Subtle changes and variations were made to both the letterforms and the spacing between characters in order to make it more readable at various resolutions.
The changes cause the typeface to nearly match Linotype Helvetica
Helvetica
Helvetica is a widely used sans-serif typeface developed in 1957 by Swiss typeface designer Max Miedinger with Eduard Hoffmann.-Visual distinctive characteristics:Characteristics of this typeface are:lower case:square dot over the letter i....
in both proportion and weight (see figure), and perfectly match in width. Nevertheless, there are differences. One columnist observed "Arial was drawn more rounded than [Helvetica], the curves softer and fuller and the counters more open. The ends of the strokes on letters such as c, e, g and s, rather than being cut off on the horizontal, are terminated at the more natural angle in relation to the stroke direction."
The styling of Arabic glyphs comes from Times New Roman, which have more varied stroke widths than the Latin, Greek
Greek alphabet
The Greek alphabet is the script that has been used to write the Greek language since at least 730 BC . The alphabet in its classical and modern form consists of 24 letters ordered in sequence from alpha to omega...
, Cyrillic glyphs found in the font. Arial Unicode MS
Arial Unicode MS
In digital typography, the TrueType font Arial Unicode MS is an extended version of the font Arial. Compared to Arial, it includes higher line height, omits kerning pairs and adds enough glyphs to cover a large subset of Unicode 2.1—thus supporting most Microsoft code pages, but also requiring much...
uses monotone stroke widths on Arabic glyphs
Arabic alphabet
The Arabic alphabet or Arabic abjad is the Arabic script as it is codified for writing the Arabic language. It is written from right to left, in a cursive style, and includes 28 letters. Because letters usually stand for consonants, it is classified as an abjad.-Consonants:The Arabic alphabet has...
, similar to Tahoma
Tahoma (typeface)
Tahoma is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Matthew Carter for the Microsoft Corporation in 1994 with initial distribution along with Verdana for Windows 95....
.
The Cyrillic, Greek and Coptic
Coptic alphabet
The Coptic alphabet is the script used for writing the Coptic language. The repertoire of glyphs is based on the Greek alphabet augmented by letters borrowed from the Demotic and is the first alphabetic script used for the Egyptian language...
Spacing Modifier Letters glyphs initially introduced in Arial Unicode MS, but later debuted in Arial version 5.00, have different appearances.
History
IBMIBM
International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
debuted two printers for the in-office publishing market in 1982: the 240-DPI
Dots per inch
Dots per inch is a measure of spatial printing or video dot density, in particular the number of individual dots that can be placed in a line within the span of 1 inch . The DPI value tends to correlate with image resolution, but is related only indirectly.- DPI measurement in monitor...
3800-3 laserxerographic printer
Laser printer
A laser printer is a common type of computer printer that rapidly produces high quality text and graphics on plain paper. As with digital photocopiers and multifunction printers , laser printers employ a xerographic printing process, but differ from analog photocopiers in that the image is produced...
, and the 600-DPI 4250 electro-erosion laminate typesetter.
IBM named the font Sonoran Sans Serif due to licensing restrictions and the manufacturing facility's location (Tucson, Arizona
Tucson, Arizona
Tucson is a city in and the county seat of Pima County, Arizona, United States. The city is located 118 miles southeast of Phoenix and 60 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border. The 2010 United States Census puts the city's population at 520,116 with a metropolitan area population at 1,020,200...
, in the Sonoran Desert
Sonoran Desert
The Sonoran Desert is a North American desert which straddles part of the United States-Mexico border and covers large parts of the U.S. states of Arizona and California and the northwest Mexican states of Sonora, Baja California, and Baja California Sur. It is one of the largest and hottest...
), and announced in early 1984 that the Sonoran Sans Serif family, "a functional equivalent of Monotype Arial," would be available for licensed use in the 3800-3 by the fourth quarter of 1984. There were initially 14 point
Point (typography)
In typography, a point is the smallest unit of measure, being a subdivision of the larger pica. It is commonly abbreviated as pt. The point has long been the usual unit for measuring font size and leading and other minute items on a printed page....
sizes, ranging from 6 to 36, and four style/weight combinations (Roman medium, Roman bold, italic medium, and italic bold), for a total of 56 fonts in the family. Each contained 238 graphic characters, providing support for eleven national languages: Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish. Monotype and IBM later expanded the family to include 300-DPI bitmaps and characters for additional languages.
In 1989, Monotype produced PostScript Type 1
PostScript fonts
PostScript fonts are outline font specifications developed by Adobe Systems for professional digital typesetting, which uses PostScript file format to encode font information.-History:...
outline versions of several Monotype fonts, but an official PostScript version of Arial was not available until 1991. In the meantime, a company called Birmy marketed a version of Arial in a Type 1-compatible format.
In 1990, Robin Nicholas, Patricia Saunders and Steve Matteson
Steve Matteson
Steven R. Matteson is an American typeface designer whose work is included in several computer operating systems and embedded in game consoles, cell phones and other electronic devices...
developed a TrueType
TrueType
TrueType is an outline font standard originally developed by Apple Computer in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobe's Type 1 fonts used in PostScript...
outline version of Arial which was licensed to Microsoft.
In 1992, Microsoft chose Arial to be one of the four core TrueType fonts in Windows 3.1, announcing the font as an "alternative to Helvetica".
TrueType/OpenType version history
Version 2.76 or later includes Hebrew and Arabic glyphs, with most of Arabic added on non-italic fonts.Version 5.00 added support for Latin-C and Latin D, IPA Extension, Greek Extended, Cyrillic Supplement, and Coptic characters.
Distribution
TrueType editions of Arial have shipped as part of Microsoft Windows since the introduction of Windows 3.1 in 1992.Since 1999, Microsoft Office
Microsoft Office
Microsoft Office is a non-free commercial office suite of inter-related desktop applications, servers and services for the Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems, introduced by Microsoft in August 1, 1989. Initially a marketing term for a bundled set of applications, the first version of...
has shipped with Arial Unicode MS
Arial Unicode MS
In digital typography, the TrueType font Arial Unicode MS is an extended version of the font Arial. Compared to Arial, it includes higher line height, omits kerning pairs and adds enough glyphs to cover a large subset of Unicode 2.1—thus supporting most Microsoft code pages, but also requiring much...
, a version of Arial that includes many international characters from the Unicode
Unicode
Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...
standard. This version of the typeface is the most widely distributed pan-Unicode font.
Arial MT, a PostScript version of the Arial font family, was distributed with Acrobat Reader
Adobe Acrobat
Adobe Acrobat is a family of application software developed by Adobe Systems to view, create, manipulate, print and manage files in Portable Document Format . All members of the family, except Adobe Reader , are commercial software, while the latter is available as freeware and can be downloaded...
4 and 5.
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.
Mac OS X
Mac OS X
Mac OS X is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems...
was the first Mac OS
Mac OS
Mac OS is a series of graphical user interface-based operating systems developed by Apple Inc. for their Macintosh line of computer systems. The Macintosh user experience is credited with popularizing the graphical user interface...
version to include Arial. The operating system ships with Arial, Arial Black, Arial Narrow, and Arial Rounded MT. However, the default Mac OS X font for sans-serif/Swiss generic font family is Helvetica.
The inclusion of Arial with Windows and Mac OS has contributed to it being one of the most widely distributed and used typefaces in the world.
Arial variants
Here are the known variations of Arial:- 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
- 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 Light, Arial Rounded Regular, Arial Rounded Medium, Arial Rounded Bold, Arial Rounded Extra Bold. The regular versions of the rounded glyphs can be found in Gulim, Microsoft's Korean font set. Originally only available in bold form as Arial Rounded MT Bold, extra fonts appeared as retail products. In Linotype's retail version, only Arial Rounded Regular supports WGL character set.
- Arial Special: Arial Special G1, Arial Special G2. They are included with Microsoft Encarta Virtual Globe 99, Expedia Streets and Trips 2000, MapPoint 2000.
- Arial Light, Arial Medium, Arial Extra Bold, Arial Light Condensed, Arial Condensed, Arial Medium Condensed, Arial Bold Condensed: These fonts first appeared in the Linotype online stores. The condensed fonts do not have italic counterparts.
- Arial Monospaced: In this monospaced variant, letters such as @, I, i, j, l (lowercase L), M, W are redesigned.
Arial Alternative
Arial Alternative Regular and Arial Alternative Symbol are standard fonts in Windows MeWindows Me
Windows Millennium Edition, or Windows Me , is a graphical operating system released on September 14, 2000 by Microsoft, and was the last operating system released in the Windows 9x series. Support for Windows Me ended on July 11, 2006....
, and can also be found in Windows 95
Windows 95
Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented graphical user interface-based operating system. It was released on August 24, 1995 by Microsoft, and was a significant progression from the company's previous Windows products...
and Windows XP
Windows XP
Windows XP is an operating system produced by Microsoft for use on personal computers, including home and business desktops, laptops and media centers. First released to computer manufacturers on August 24, 2001, it is the second most popular version of Windows, based on installed user base...
's installation CD, or in Microsoft's site. Both fonts are Symbol-encoded. These fonts emulate the monospaced font used in Minitel
Minitel
The Minitel is a Videotex online service accessible through the telephone lines, and is considered one of the world's most successful pre-World Wide Web online services. It was launched in France in 1982 by the PTT...
/Prestel
Prestel
Prestel , the brand name for the UK Post Office's Viewdata technology, was an interactive videotex system developed during the late 1970s and commercially launched in 1979...
teletext
Teletext
Teletext is a television information retrieval service developed in the United Kingdom in the early 1970s. It offers a range of text-based information, typically including national, international and sporting news, weather and TV schedules...
systems, but vectorized with Arial styling. The fonts are used by HyperTerminal.
Arial Alternative Regular contains only ASCII characters, while Arial Alternative Symbol contains only 2x3 braille
Braille
The Braille system is a method that is widely used by blind people to read and write, and was the first digital form of writing.Braille was devised in 1825 by Louis Braille, a blind Frenchman. Each Braille character, or cell, is made up of six dot positions, arranged in a rectangle containing two...
characters.
Code page variants
Arial Baltic, Arial CE, Arial Cyr, Arial Greek, Arial Tur are aliases created in the FontSubstitutes section of WIN.INI by Windows. These entries all point to the master font. When an alias font is specified, the font's character map contains different character set from the master font and the other alias fonts.In addition, Monotype also sells Arial in reduced character sets, such as Arial CE, Arial WGL, Arial Cyrillic, Arial Greek, Arial Hebrew, Arial Thai.
Arial Unicode is a version supporting all characters assigned with Unicode 2.1 code points.
Arial
The TrueType core Arial fonts (Arial, Arial Bold, Arial Italic, Arial Bold Italic) support the same character sets as the version 2.76 fonts found in Internet Explorer 5/6, Windows 98/ME.Version sold by Linotype includes Arial Rounded, Arial Monospaced, Arial Condensed, Arial Central European, Arial Central European Narrow, Arial Cyrillic, Arial Cyrillic Narrow, Arial Dual Greek, Arial Dual Greek Narrow, Arial SF, Arial Turkish, Arial Turkish Narrow.
In addition, Monotype also sells Arial in reduced character sets, such as Arial CE, Arial WGL, Arial Cyrillic, Arial Greek, Arial Hebrew, Arial Thai, Arial SF.
Arial WGL
It is a version that covers only the Windows Glyph List 4 (WGL4) characters. They are only sold in TrueType format.The family includes Arial (regular, bold, italics), Arial Black, Arial Narrow (regular, bold, italics), Arial Rounded (regular, bold).
Ascender Corporation fonts
Ascender Corporation sells the font in Arial WGL family, as well as the Arial Unicode.Arial in other font families
Arial glyphs are also used in fonts developed for non-Latin environments, including Arabic Transparent, BrowalliaUPC, Cordia New, CordiaUPC, Miriam, Miriam Transparent, Monotype Hei, Simplified Arabic.Criticism and similar fonts
Arial is held in disregard by many 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 HelveticaHelvetica
Helvetica is a widely used sans-serif typeface developed in 1957 by Swiss typeface designer Max Miedinger with Eduard Hoffmann.-Visual distinctive characteristics:Characteristics of this typeface are:lower case:square dot over the letter i....
stand-in, but without paying royalties, or credit, to Helvetica. Arial's glyph widths are nearly identical to those of Helvetica, rather than Monotype Grotesque, on which Arial is otherwise based, and many people are unable to tell the difference between Helvetica, Arial and other similar fonts. "But to an experienced designer," writes typographer Mark Simonson, using Arial "was like asking for Jimmy Stewart and getting Rich Little
Rich Little
Richard Caruthers "Rich" Little is a Canadian-American impressionist and voice actor. He has long been known throughout the world as a top impersonator of famous people, resulting in his nickname, "The Man of a Thousand Voices"....
." At the same time, there are a number of fonts which are direct copies of Helvetica that several type manufacturers have created, including Triumvirate, Helios, Megaron, and Newton.
In 2005, Robin Nicholas was asked, before bringing up the subject of Arial, how far he would compromise his artistic principles for money. Nicholas responded that he would never just recreate an existing font, and the only areas where he would take a stand are "those where there would be legal problems; somebody wanting us to make a typeface that's clearly a corruption of somebody else's typeface."
Proprietary font
Arial is a proprietary font. Monotype Imaging owns all right, title and interest in and to the Arial font software, its structure, organization, code including all property rights therein such as copyright, design and trademark rights.According to the Arial font license, users are not allowed to modify, alter, translate, convert, or otherwise change the computer font, or to create derivative works from it or any portion thereof. They are also not allowed to rent, lease, sublicense, give, lend, or further distribute the computer font, or any copy thereof, without purchasing a license.
Core fonts for the Web
Core fonts for the Web
Core fonts for the Web was a project begun by Microsoft in 1996 to make a standard pack of fonts for the Internet. It was terminated in 2002. It included the proprietary fonts Andale Mono, Arial, Arial Black, Comic Sans MS, Courier New, Georgia, Impact, Times New Roman, Trebuchet MS, Verdana and...
was a project begun by Microsoft in 1996 to make a standard pack of fonts for the Internet. Arial computer font in TrueType format was included in this project. It allowed anyone to download and install these fonts for their own use (on end user's computers) without any fee. The project was terminated by Microsoft in August 2002, allegedly due to frequent EULA violations. For MS Windows, the core fonts for the web were provided as self-extracting executables (.exe); each included an embedded cabinet
Cabinet (file format)
In computing, CAB is the Microsoft Windows native compressed archive format. It supports compression and digital signing, and is used in a variety of Microsoft installation engines: Setup API, Device Installer, AdvPack and Windows Installer.Though Cabinet was originally called Diamond, its .CAB...
file, which can be extracted with appropriate software. For the Macintosh, the files were provided as BinHex
BinHex
BinHex, short for "binary-to-hexadecimal", is a binary-to-text encoding system that was used on the Mac OS for sending binary files through e-mail. It is similar to Uuencode, but combined both "forks" of the Mac file system together, along with extended file information...
ed StuffIt
StuffIt
StuffIt is a family of computer software utilities for archiving and compressing files on the Macintosh and Microsoft Windows platforms: it was originally produced for the Macintosh. An old version for Linux and Sun Solaris 2.7 or later is also available...
archives (.sit.hqx). The latest font version that was available from Core fonts for the Web was 2.82, published in 2000. Later versions (such as version 3 or version 5 which include many new characters) were not available from this project. A Microsoft spokesman declared in 2002 that members of the open source community "will have to find different sources for updated fonts. ... Although the EULA did not restrict the fonts to just Windows and Mac OS, they were only ever available as Windows .exe's and Mac archive files." The chief technical officer of Opera Software cited the cancellation of the project as an example of Microsoft resisting interoperability.
It is not allowed to rename, edit or create any derivative works from the executables (arial32.exe) or archives (Arial.sit.hqx) from the Core fonts for the Web project, other than subsetting when embedding them in documents. Copies of the executables or archives from this project may not be distributed for profit either on a standalone basis or included as part of other product. It is allowed to reproduce and distribute an unlimited number of copies of the executables and archives from the Core fonts for the Web project; provided that each copy shall be a true and complete copy, including all copyright and trademark notices, and shall be accompanied by a copy of EULA.
Free alternatives
There are some free softwareFree software
Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...
metric-compatible fonts used as free Arial alternatives or used for Arial font substitution
Font substitution
Font substitution is the process of using one font in place of another when the intended font either is not available or does not contain glyphs for the required characters.Font substitution can be aided by:...
:
- Liberation SansLiberation fontsLiberation is the collective name of four TrueType font families: Liberation Sans, Liberation Sans Narrow, Liberation Serif and Liberation Mono...
is a metrically equivalent font to Arial developed by Ascender Corp. and published by Red Hat in 2007 under the GPL license with some exceptions. It is used in some GNU/Linux distributions as default font replacement for Arial. Liberation Sans Narrow is a metrically equivalent font to Arial Narrow contributed to Liberation fonts by Oracle in 2010. - URW++ produced a version of Helvetica called Nimbus Sans L in 1987, and it was eventually released under the GPLGNU General Public LicenseThe GNU General Public License is the most widely used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU Project....
and AFPLAladdin Free Public LicenseThe Aladdin Free Public License, abbreviated AFPL, is a license written by L. Peter Deutsch for his Ghostscript PostScript language interpreter.-History:The license was derived from the GNU General Public License, but differs on two key points:...
(as Type 1 font for Ghostscript) in 1996. It is one of the GhostscriptGhostscriptGhostscript is a suite of software based on an interpreter for Adobe Systems' PostScript and Portable Document Format page description languages.- Features :...
fonts, a free alternatives to 35 basic PostScript fonts (which include Helvetica). It is available in major freeFree softwareFree software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...
and open source operating systems. Nimbus Sans L is also used in some software for Arial font substitution. - FreeSans, a free font descending from URW++ Nimbus Sans L, which in turn descends from Helvetica. It is one of free fonts developed in GNU FreeFont project, first published in 2002. It is used in some free software as Arial replacement or for Arial font substitution.
See also
- Core fonts for the WebCore fonts for the WebCore fonts for the Web was a project begun by Microsoft in 1996 to make a standard pack of fonts for the Internet. It was terminated in 2002. It included the proprietary fonts Andale Mono, Arial, Arial Black, Comic Sans MS, Courier New, Georgia, Impact, Times New Roman, Trebuchet MS, Verdana and...
- List of fonts
:Category:Monotype typefaces – typefaces owned by or designed for Monotype Imaging
Monotype Corporation
Monotype Imaging Holdings is a Delaware corporation based in Woburn, Massachusetts and specializing in typesetting and typeface design as well as text and imaging solutions for use with consumer electronics devices. Monotype Imaging Holdings is the owner of Monotype Imaging Inc., Linotype,...
External links
- Microsoft Typography: Arial, Arial Black, Arial Narrow, Arial Rounded MT, Arial Special G1/G2, Arial Narrow Special G1/G2, Arial Unicode MS
- Downloadable version of Arial (Web core fontsCore fonts for the WebCore fonts for the Web was a project begun by Microsoft in 1996 to make a standard pack of fonts for the Internet. It was terminated in 2002. It included the proprietary fonts Andale Mono, Arial, Arial Black, Comic Sans MS, Courier New, Georgia, Impact, Times New Roman, Trebuchet MS, Verdana and...
) - Downloadable version of Arial Black (Web core fonts)
- Linotype/Monotype Arial families: Arial, Arial WGL