Lesley,

On Sep 21, 2009, at 10:30 PM, Lesley Binks wrote:

> Not sure about the relationship/history between Nimbus sans L and
> Helvetica nor can I determine how good a substitute it is.

Nimbus Sans L is a clone of Helvetica and has nearly the same metrics.  
I use it in my basic font-stack [1] actually. The 'normal' line-height  
is slightly larger than e.g. Arial (1.242 for Nimbus, 1.150 for  
Arial), the aspect ratio for the 3 fonts is nearly equivalent  
(0.523~0.524).
The one problem the version of Helvetica that ships with OS X has is a  
very tight 'normal' (that is intrinsic) line-height: 1.005. But if you  
specify the line-height in your stylesheet, that doesn't affect you.

[1] font: 1em/1.4 'Helvetica Neue', 'Nimbus Sans L', Arial, sans-serif;
'Helvetica Neue' is a better screen font than 'Helvetica, and matches  
much closer the intrinsic line-height of Arial. Plus it has multiple  
weights (100, 300, 400, 700 or UltraLight, Light, Normal/regular and  
bold) which is a nice thing to use, sometimes

Philippe
---
Philippe Wittenbergh
http://l-c-n.com/





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