The Mystery Wrap

[Fred Ridder]

Frank Dodd asked (among other questions):
 
> How to change all the fonts in every style to Arial in one fell swoop?
 
Others have answered the "how to". All I want to do is make sure
that you really want to do this before you go down that path. 
 
The Arial font was patterned on Helvetica, and was specifically 
designed to have nearly identical font metrics (e.g. character widths) 
so that it could be substituted for Helvetica with minimal hassle in 
cases where the user did not want to pay to license Helvetica (which 
is still a proprietary design and licensed intellectual property). So in
the practical, technical sense, you should be able to globally replace 
one with the other with minimal impact on your document. But the 
problem is that Arial simply doesn't look as good as Helvetica if you
look closely, particularly if you are using it in larger point sizes for
headings and titles. My own approach to the situation you describe
would be to obtain and install a licensed version of Helvetica so that
your PDFs will use the better looking typeface that the document was
designed to use. 
 
As noted previously, Adobe is one source of the Helvetica font. They
sell a "Type Basics" package for US$99 that includes 65 different 
PostScript fonts (with the regular, bold, italic, and bold-italic variations
of a typeface counting as four fonts). In that package are the "soft" 
versions of the set of 35 fonts that are resident in most modern 
PostScript printers, which includes Helvetica, Times, Courier, Avant 
Garde, Bookman, Garamond, Palatino, and others. With those soft
fonts in your computer, you can create PDFs that embed the printer-
resident fonts in the PDF itself so that the files can be printed on 
any type of printer, PostScript or not, with full font fidelity.
-Fred Ridder