Arial

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Category Sans-serif
Classification Neo-grotesque sans-serif
Designer(s) Robin Nicholas
Patricia Saunders
Foundry Monotype Imaging
Date released 1982
License Proprietary

Arial, sometimes marketed or displayed in software as Arial MT, is a sans-serif typeface and set of computer fonts. Fonts from the Arial family are packaged with all versions of Microsoft Windows, some other Microsoft software applications,[1] Apple Mac OS X[2] and many PostScript 3 computer printers.[3] 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. More recently Arial Rounded has also been widely bundled.

Design characteristics

Helvetica (in red) overlaid with Arial (in blue)
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Arial vs. Helvetica.

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

In 2005, Robin Nicholas said "It was designed as a generic sans serif; almost a bland sans serif."[4]

The letter shapes of Arial are based on Monotype Grotesque.[5][6] 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[7] (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."[5]

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.

History

IBM 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.[8][9] Monotype was under contract to supply bitmap fonts for both printers.[5][8] The fonts for the 4250, delivered to IBM in 1983,[10] included Helvetica, which Monotype sub-licensed from Linotype.[8] For the 3800-3, Monotype substituted Helvetica with Arial.[8] The hand-drawn Arial artwork was completed in 1982 at Monotype by a 10-person team led by Robin Nicholas and Patricia Saunders[4][11] and was digitized by Monotype at 240 DPI expressly for the 3800-3.[12]

IBM named the font Sonoran Sans Serif due to licensing restrictions and the manufacturing facility's location (Tucson, Arizona, in the Sonoran Desert),[5][13] 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,[10] but an official PostScript version of Arial was not available until 1991.[citation needed] In the meantime, a company called Birmy marketed a version of Arial in a Type 1-compatible format.[7][14]

In 1990, Robin Nicholas, Patricia Saunders[4][11] and Steve Matteson developed a TrueType outline version of Arial which was licensed to Microsoft.[10][15][16]

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".[10][11][17]

TrueType/OpenType version history

Version 2.76 or later includes Hebrew (designed by Baruch Gorkin[18]) 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.[17]

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.[19][20]

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 bundling of Arial with Windows and Mac OS has contributed to it being one of the most widely distributed and used typefaces in the world.

In 1996, Microsoft launched the Core fonts for the Web project to make a standard pack of fonts for the Internet. Arial in TrueType format was included in this project. The project 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.[21][22][23] 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 BinHexed 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."[21] The chief technical officer of Opera Software cited the cancellation of the project as an example of Microsoft resisting interoperability.[24]

Arial variants

The known variants of Arial include:

Sample Text of Arial Black, a variant 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[25]
  • 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 (uppercase i), i, j, l (lowercase L), M, W are redesigned.

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, or in Microsoft's site.[26] 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 2 × 3 braille 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.

Monotype/Linotype retail versions

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

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Arial vs. Helvetica.

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.[7] It is reinforced by Arial's apparent status as a de facto Helvetica stand-in, but without paying royalties, or credit, to Helvetica. Arial's glyph widths are nearly identical to those of Helvetica,[7][27] rather than Monotype Grotesque, on which Arial is otherwise based.[7] "But to an experienced designer," writes typographer Mark Simonson, using Arial "was like asking for Jimmy Stewart and getting Rich Little."[7] 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.[7]

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."[4]

Free alternatives

Arial is a proprietary typeface[28] to which Monotype Imaging owns all rights, including copyright, design and trademark rights.[29] Its licensing terms prohibit derivative works and free redistribution.[30][31][32][33][34][35][36]

There are some free software metric-compatible fonts used as free Arial alternatives or used for Arial font substitution:

  • Liberation Sans is a metrically equivalent font to Arial developed by Ascender Corp. and published by Red Hat in 2007, initially under the GPL license with some exceptions.[37] Versions 2.00.0 onwards are published under SIL Open Font License.[38] It is used in some GNU/Linux distributions as default font replacement for Arial.[39] Liberation Sans Narrow is a metrically equivalent font to Arial Narrow contributed to Liberation fonts by Oracle in 2010.[40]
  • URW++ produced a version of Helvetica called Nimbus Sans L in 1987, and it was eventually released under the GPL and AFPL (as Type 1 font for Ghostscript) in 1996.[41][42][43] It is one of the Ghostscript fonts, a free alternatives to 35 basic PostScript fonts (which include Helvetica). It is available in major free 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.[28][44] 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 Web
  • List of fonts
  • Category:Monotype typefaces – typefaces owned by or designed for Monotype Imaging

References

  1. ↑ Microsoft Corporation. "Arial – Products that supply this font". Retrieved 2010-01-31. 
  2. ↑ Apple Inc. "Mac OS X 10.5: Fonts list". Archived from the original on 20 January 2010. Retrieved 2010-01-31. 
  3. ↑ "Adobe PostScript 3 fonts". Archived from the original on 5 June 2011. Retrieved 2011-05-04. 
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 "Twenty/20" (PDF). MacUser. 8 July 2005. 
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 Haley, Allan (May/June 2007). "Is Arial Dead Yet?". Step Inside Design. Retrieved 2011-05-11. 
  6. ↑ "Type Designer Showcase: Robin Nicholas – Arial". Monotype Imaging. Retrieved 2011-05-10. 
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6 Simonson, Mark. "The Scourge of Arial". Archived from the original on 25 May 2011. Retrieved 2011-05-11. 
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 8.3 Boag, Andrew (14 Oct 1996). "Have you ever thought about the LaserWriter fonts and how you got them?". Typo-L mailing list. http://www.xnet.se/xpo/typetalk/. Retrieved 9 May 2011. "Monotype's first contract for the IBM 4250 included [...] Helvetica (sub-licenced from Lino) [...] When it came to the 3800 laser printer I think IBM wanted a functional equivalent to Helvetica to save on the licencing wrangles, and this is when the Arial bitmaps were first created. But IBM named all the fonts in the machine after rivers in Colorado (!) so it was initially called Sonoran Sans." Boag is a former Monotype employee.
  9. ↑ The 4250 prototype debuted at Drupa in 1982, but the production model 4250/II wasn't on the market until 1984.
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 10.2 10.3 Wallis, Lawrence W. "About Us: The Monotype Chronicles". Monotype Imaging. Retrieved 2011-05-11. "1983 [...] Monotype supplied IBM with digital fonts for its 600 dpi 4250 Printer operating on the principle of electro-erosion of the coated surface of a laminated substrate. [...] 1989 – Monotype issued first fonts in the PostScript Type 1 format containing ‘hinted’ refinements under license from Adobe Systems. [...] 1990 – Monotype Typography licensed to Microsoft a set of 13 core fonts in the TrueType format for use in the Windows and OS/2 environments. It was an association that burgeoned further with release of additional TrueType font packages in 1992 and afterwards." 
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2 Robin Nicholas bio at Ascender Corporation by Monotype Imaging website [blacklisted, so direct link not available] "[Robin Nicholas] in 1982 developed a sans serif typeface for bitmap font laser printers which was later developed, with Patricia Saunders, into the Arial typeface family – chosen by Microsoft as a core font for Windows 3.1 (and subsequent versions)"
  12. ↑ "IBM Typographic Fonts for IBM 3800 Printing Subsystem Model 3 [announcement letter 284-040]". 7 Feb 1984. "The fonts, designed for use with the IBM 3800 Printing Subsystem Model 3, consist of proportionally spaced, digitized, alphabetic character, and other forms in sizes ranging from 4 to 36 points (approximately 1/18-inch to 1/2-inch) in height. Each character pattern is printed at a density of 240 × 240 dots (pels) per square inch. Letter forms were digitized by The Monotype Corporation, Limited, from original artwork. The digitization was done at 240 × 240 dots (pels) per square inch expressly for the IBM 3800 Printing Subsystem Model 3." 
  13. ↑ A Guide to Understanding AFP Fonts (PDF), International Business Machines Corporation, 30 Dec 1999, retrieved 2011-05-10, "The Sonoran font products were created to provide AFP customers with two of the most popular typefaces: Times New Roman and Arial (Monotype's equivalent of Helvetica). Due to licensing requirements in place at the time, the type family names used for the IBM-supplied versions of these fonts were changed from Times New Roman to Sonoran Serif and from Arial to Sonoran Sans Serif. These 240 dpi-only fonts were extensively hand-edited. Since the characters in the fonts were not derived from common databases, there is no linear progression of character size as point size increases, a requirement for migration to outline fonts. [...] Since the linearity issue cannot be resolved (each character in each point size is unique and not linearly related to the same character in any other point size) there will be no outline font support for the Sonoran fonts and the migration path will stop at 300-pel.." 
  14. ↑ Fenton, Erfert (1989), The Macintosh Font Book (1 ed.), Peachpit Press  (Verification needed; Google Books search result only shows that Arial is mentioned.)
  15. ↑ "Steve Matteson". MyFonts.com (Bitstream Inc.). Retrieved 2011-05-11. 
  16. ↑ Steve Matteson bio at Ascender Corporation by Monotype Imaging website [blacklisted, so direct link not available] "In 1990 Steve was hired by Monotype Typography as a contractor to aid in the production of Microsoft’s first TrueType fonts."
  17. ↑ 17.0 17.1 "New features in Windows 3.1". Microsoft. 16 November 2006. Retrieved 2008-03-08. "Windows 3.1 includes the new TrueType scalable-font technology…Four TrueType scalable-font families will ship with all copies of Windows 3.1: Arial (alternative to Helvetica), Times New Roman, Courier, and Symbol." 
  18. ↑ http://luc.devroye.org/fonts-32904.html
  19. ↑ Adobe Systems Incorporated, PostScript Language Reference Supplement, Adobe PostScript 3, Version 3010 and 3011 Product Supplement, Appendix D, 30 August 1999. Retrieved 29 April 2006.
  20. ↑ Adobe Systems Incorporated, The Adobe PostScript 3 Font Set. Retrieved 29 April 2006.
  21. ↑ 21.0 21.1 Mark Hachman (14 August 2002). "Microsoft Withdraws Free Web Fonts". ExtremeTech. Archived from the original on 17 April 2010. Retrieved 2010-04-13. 
  22. ↑ Jesse Burgheimer (13 August 2002). "Microsoft Cuts the Line to Web Core Fonts". archive.org. Archived from the original on 11 January 2008. Retrieved 2010-04-13. 
  23. ↑ "Microsoft Cuts the Line to Web Core Fonts". 13 August 2002. Archived from the original on 13 March 2008. Retrieved 2008-08-04. 
  24. ↑ "Opera to MS: Get real about interoperability, Mr Gates – Opera CTO Hakon Lie responds to Bill's clarion call". 11 February 2005. Archived from the original on 25 May 2010. Retrieved 2010-07-02. 
  25. ↑ "Arial Unicode MS". Archived from the original on 8 January 2010. Retrieved 2010-01-15. 
  26. ↑ "Knowledge base", Support, Microsoft 
  27. ↑ Simonson, Mark. "How to Spot Arial". Retrieved 2012-02-10.  Explains the differences between Arial, Helvetica, and Monotype Grotesque 215.
  28. ↑ 28.0 28.1 "GNU FreeFont – Why do we need free outline UCS fonts?". 4 October 2009. Archived from the original on 16 June 2010. Retrieved 2010-07-02. 
  29. ↑ Copyright registrations for the TrueType "computer programs": Arial Roman, Arial Bold, Arial Italic, and Arial Bold Italic.
  30. ↑ "Monotype Imaging, Inc. – End User License Agreement". Archived from the original on 17 July 2010. Retrieved 2010-07-02. 
  31. ↑ "Monotype Imaging – Licensing Options". Archived from the original on 4 July 2010. Retrieved 2010-07-02. 
  32. ↑ "Microsoft Typography – Arial". Archived from the original on 25 July 2010. Retrieved 2010-07-02. 
  33. ↑ Microsoft. "Core fonts for the Web – End-User License Agreement for Microsoft Software". Retrieved 2010-04-13. 
  34. ↑ Microsoft (28 December 2001). "TrueType core fonts for the Web EULA". Retrieved 2010-04-13. 
  35. ↑ Microsoft (12 October 2001). "TrueType core fonts for the Web FAQ". Archived from the original on 29 March 2010. Retrieved 2010-04-13. 
  36. ↑ Microsoft (25 July 2002). "TrueType core fonts for the Web FAQ". Retrieved 2010-04-13. 
  37. ↑ LiberationFontLicense – License Agreement and Limited Product Warranty, Liberation Font Software, retrieved 2012-12-19 
  38. ↑ LICENSE - liberation-fonts, retrieved 2012-12-19 
  39. ↑ Mandriva Linux 2008 Release Tour, retrieved 2010-04-04, "integrated into Mandriva Linux 2008" 
  40. ↑ "OpenOffice.org 3.3 New Features". 
  41. ↑ Finally! Good-quality free (GPL) basic-35 PostScript Type 1 fonts., archived from the original on 23 October 2002, retrieved 2010-05-06 
  42. ↑ Finally! Good-quality free (GPL) basic-35 PostScript Type 1 fonts. (TXT), retrieved 2010-05-06 
  43. ↑ "Fonts and TeX". 19 December 2009. Retrieved 2010-05-06. 
  44. ↑ "GNU FreeFont – Design notes". 4 October 2009. Archived from the original on 15 June 2010. Retrieved 2010-07-02. 

External links

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