Windows is setup to use Arial whenever it sees a reference to ‘Helvetica’. It’s not too much to ask that users are told when and what font substitution is done. Alas, Microsoft’s implementation lacks transparency or clarity for anyone who needs the exact font used.
The idea of font substitution is a good one. You can change the font substitution for an individual document on the Word dialog shown above by choosing another font. The default substitution for ‘Helvetica’ is ‘Arial’ It’s a sneaky way to substitute a popular font while obscuring the truth. In fact ,it’s quite wrong and misleading.
We can see that ‘Helvetica Neue’ is substituted with ‘Malgun Gothic’ – no problem there.Īccording to Word the substitution for ‘Helvetica’ is ‘Helvetica’ or ‘Default’ depending on which part of the dialog box you read! That doesn’t make any sense on several levels.
