Other than being sans serif typefaces, Helvetica (along with Arial) have little in common with Verdana.
Consulting both Wikipedia and Bringhurst's 'The Elements of Typographic Style', Helvetica is in the humanist family of typefaces and was designed in the 1950's, before digital typography. Verdana is in the realist family of typefaces and was designed and hinted specifically to be clear at small sizes on a computer screen. I see that Wikipedia and Bringhurst disagree on the classification of Helvetica (Wikipedia putting it among the early sans serif or Grotesque and Bringhurst putting in the humanist family. I think Bringhurst is probably the more reliable source.) It can be hard to find typefaces that look excellent on paper and on screen (and on both Windows and OS X). Sometimes I'll reset a document in a different typeface when I print it out. The technical documents I'm producing right now I'm putting in Bera (based on Vera Bitstream, realist family) as a reasonable compromise. -- Rich On Sat, Jun 13, 2009 at 3:44 AM, Jürgen Spitzmüller<[email protected]> wrote: > John Culleton wrote: >> Verdana is Microsoft's name for Helvetica. > > I doubt that. Verdana is a genuine development by the font designer Matthew > Carter. You probably refer to Arial, which is similar (but not identical) to > Helvetica. > > Jürgen >
