Should really be in software or something.

Anyways, I haz accessed the Helvetica font off the interwebz but in powerpoint 2010, certain characters don't display properly and the word reverts to Times New Roman font. These are things like apostrophe and pound sign. Really frustrating as I'm sure Helvetica used to be a standard windows font. I've tried character map without success. The current best thing to do is highlight the symbol and change it to Arial. The rest of the word changes back to Helvetica whilst the symbol is displayed properly albeit in Arial.

What am I doing wrong? Dodgy font? Improper install? Limitation of font?

From where did you get the font? Was it part of the OS install, did you buy it from a font foundry, or just get it off a download site somewhere?

Downloaded it from whatever source I normally get things. I know I had Helvetica on my old laptop so will have a look and see if it's anywhere in the backup files.

Not the "naughty servers"? Ho hum - you get what you pay for. With fonts, this is certainly true - especially when you consider that a lot of the nicer glyphs will be missing too.

Best dig out a legit copy, really.

I am probably wrong here, but wasn't Helvetica a Mac font? Ariel, I thought, was created as a non-Mac alternative?

It's not quite as simple as that, but Arial was billed as the "Windows Helvetica alternative" quite early on.

Nimbus Sans is a proper Helvetica knock-off - in other words it looks functionally identical, where Arial just makes me want to puke - and is available as open source and licence-free.

I am always surprised by the amount of hate for Arial - it ain't that bad!

Slightly off-topic, but today I saw four company logos/business names in Papyrus

Eek.

Arial. It's just ugly. Ugly, ugly, ugly. Like Comic Sans only worse. The horrid chopped top of the lowercase 't', that awful tail on the uppercase 'R'. It's like a mongrel bred from Helvetica and Gill Sans, but without any of the style.

^^^You know what? They're my fave features of arial.

Comic sans should be banned from the business world IMO. That includes the piephone.

I like a nice Akzidenz-Grotesk myself.

You are correct. Windows has never had Helvetica.

Windows 3 and Windows 95 had Helv, but then Microsoft came up with Arial, which is their customised version of Helvetica. With Windows Vista on and Office 2007 on, this has been superseded by Calibri.

I've had Helvetica on Windows before, but it never looked that good, but that was a Type 1 font, not a TT font. Arial is also designed to look good on the screen, whereas the Helvetica that Apple provide on OS X is designed for typographical situations.

It could be that you have a version that doesn't have all of the Unicode character set defined, missing pound sign makes it sound like it was designed by an American, with no thoughts about internationalisation.

Nimbus Sans is not bad tbh. There's also Droid Sans (which has all the language typesets) and Liberation Sans (which doesn't)

Just avoid Ubuntu...

This all boils down to my boss creating some stuff that went on the TV displays in the waiting area. He designed it in Adobe Illustrator on a mac using the Helvetica font.

I've been trying to create extra slides in powerpoint but wanted to keep it all the same font. Helvetica-Neue works quite well and better than the first Helvetica font I tried. It also supports the extra character sets. I may well redesign from the ground up and use the same font elsewhere.

The presentation is created in Powerpoint 2010 but will be run by Libre on Ubuntu. Am I likely to run into problems ie need to install the same font?

Not wholly correct. Microsoft and Apple have very different font display systems, as you probably know. Apple’s displays the fonts as intended by the designer. If a horizontal bar crossed the boundary between two rows of pixels, you will get anti-alisaing. The horizontal bar will appear slightly grey. However, your horizontal bar will be correctly positioned in the glyph’s rendering.

Windows behaves differently. It adjusts fonts to fit as close as it can within font pixel boundaries, so the horizontal bar will not be initialised, but moved so that it doesn’t need any antialiasing. The result is a darker, crisper appearance, but the font will not look correct when compared to its original design.

Microsoft’s screen fonts (Arial, Verdana, Tamoha, Trebuchet) are designed to look good on displays from the outset. They require minimal tweaking by the system, because features in the glyphs have been designed with displays in mind. So, yes, on a Windows machine, Arial may well display better than Helvetica, not because Helvetica is poorly designed, but because Helvetica undergoes a degree of massaging imposed by Windows.

In my opinion, a system that only works if you have a screen resolution equal to that of the printed page. Finally we're nearly there with the "retina displays", but until then the Windows way saves me from the migraines caused by fuzzy fonts. I mean seriously, that's what "print preview" is for!