Why does Arial look better than Helvetica at low point sizes

[Woolie Wool]

At small sizes on desktop displays, Arial looks much better and more readable than Helvetica despite being a blatant Helvetica clone that looks slightly worse in print and on "retina" type displays like modern smartphones and the whiz-bang 5K desktop screens that cost more than I can afford. An example from the documentation for a Wing Commander-themed FreeSpace mod. The top paragraph is set in the original 12-point Arial, the bottom in Helvetica Neue:


Helvetica looks really awful at this size on my 1920x1200, ~94 ppi display.

[leileilol]

Some hinting probably died in the Hewlett-Packard TTF version of the font (see bottom).

helvet-win.png (315 Bytes) Viewed 1162 times

I don't rememeber Helvetica this looking bad on System 7-9.

arialhelvet-mac.png (309 Bytes) Viewed 1163 times

(DISCLAIMER: had to adjust some point sizes to get the different font versions to be consistently sized with the mac capture as much as I can as there are disreprancies between Windows and Mac font rendering subsystems)

[Woolie Wool]

Your attachment doesn't appear to work.

There it goes.

The Helvetica Neue TTF I have is also not dimensionally 100% compatible with Arial (it expands the document from 57 pages to 58), which seems to indicate that something is wrong with it considering Arial's original purpose (to display documents set in Helvetica perfectly without paying license fees).

E: The ragged, semi-bold look of the Helvetica TTF at this size also matches up with the Wikipedia article on hinting showing no hinting vs. correct hinting.

[leileilol]

Yeah it's weird that I can't get the point sizes to match the Mac. Also the kerning difference is crazy

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Heres both on 11 point, and both on 12 point in Windows. No antialiasing. Both (Helveticas) are terrible. fuckin' a. fuckin' g.

helfonts.png (558 Bytes) Viewed 1156 times

and ehre's mac with 12, 14 and 18 point of both fonts (SimpleText probably isn't the best tool for this. too lazy to install clarisworks right now, kinsie can one up me on this)

helvet-mac.png (972 Bytes) Viewed 1155 times

[Kinsie]

For some reason, Windows has never seemed to do a good job of rendering Helvetica as a screen font. Even when converted directly from the font files included with OSX (where it renders fine), it looks a bit weird and lumpy.

[kodi]

What layout software are you using, and what program are you displaying your document with?

[Woolie Wool]

What layout software are you using, and what program are you displaying your document with?

OpenOffice.org

[Caligari87]

Might I suggest switching to the LibreOffice fork? It may not solve your font hinting issues, but OpenOffice is woefully out of date. LibreOffice is where all the action is happening these days.

[kodi]

Huh, I get the same problems even in indesign. It'd be really interesting knowing the technical reason for this.

[Rachael]

Different systems, different rendering engines.

As far as I know, (not 100% positive on this) the Windows NT Kernel handles font rendering, itself, directly. If not, the job would probably go to the display driver anyhow. I don't know how Mac does it, but it's probably buried in their GUI code somewhere.

Either way - different systems. Each font is vector, and the Mac system probably has something in place that handles Helvetica to prevent it from looking sloppy at lower point sizes. Windows system, itself, has a few hacks to make Cleartype render correctly for certain fonts - which makes it look weird when scaled down too much.

Linux would have its own unique way of rendering each font, as well, and while it may be closer to either Mac or Windows, it still is open source software and it is dependent on its own vector rasterizing to make it happen. This is why when using Wine on Linux, even when using the proper fonts, things still look a bit off.

[Woolie Wool]

So basically you're saying that Windows' rendering engine is probably specially built to handle Arial as perfectly as possible because it's one of the Windows core fonts?

[wildweasel]

So basically you're saying that Windows' rendering engine is probably specially built to handle Arial as perfectly as possible because it's one of the Windows core fonts?

More than likely. If you try loading the Windows core fonts on anything but Windows, they tend to look kind of weird in places, especially Segoe UI, if I remember correctly.

[Rachael]

So basically you're saying that Windows' rendering engine is probably specially built to handle Arial as perfectly as possible because it's one of the Windows core fonts?

Pretty much. Plus, what Wildweasel said.

[kodi]

I wonder why [Intended for: XYZ OS/rendering engine] information is rarely supplied with fonts then, because that's kind of extremely important to know for a designer.

[Rachael]

Mostly because rendering engines are built around those fonts, not the other way around. At least, the older ones (such as Aerial/Helvetica) anyway.