Helvetial
Published 11 years, 1 month pastMaybe all the cool kids already know this, but I didn’t, so I’ll document it for the rest of us: in Windows, Helvetica is not Helvetica: it’s Arial. It’s Arial even if you explicitly ask for Helvetica and fall back to a non-sans-serif font family and allow for no other choices — but it’s not Helvetica if you try to get to it indirectly.
To see what I mean, you can load up my testcase in any Windows browser — IE, Firefox, Chrome, whatever — assuming that you haven’t installed Helvetica on your Windows machine. (If you have, then I’d love to know what results you get.) Given that you haven’t installed Helvetica, you should see that three of the four bottom-bordered spans are using Arial. This can be determined due to the shapes of the “GR” characters — they are notably different between Helvetica and Arial. Here’s what I apply to the first test list item:
#l01 .s01 {font-family: Helvetica, monospace;}
#l01 .s02 {font-family: Arial, monospace;}
My result is that they use exactly the same face, and that face is Arial, which should not have happened. If Helvetica is not present, the first span should be rendered using a monospace font face. If it is present, then the first span should have different letterforms than the second.
But it’s the second line where things get really interesting. There, I assigned local copies of Helvetica and Arial (if they exist) to the invented family names “H” and “A”. Then I apply this to the second test list item:
#l02 .s01 {font-family: H, monospace;}
#l02 .s02 {font-family: A, monospace;}
The result should be the same as the first line, but it isn’t: the first span gets a fallback font face, and the second span gets Arial. So while the system redirects requests for Helvetica to Arial, it doesn’t do so in such a way that the invented family name “H” resolves to Arial, even though it was assigned Helvetica (or perhaps I should say “Helvetica”) as its source.
I’d be interested to know if there’s something I’ve overlooked or misunderstood here, because these waters are deep and I suspect my understanding of them is somewhat shallow.