Type 1 Helvetica, Internet Explorer, and Windows 7 Incompatible

[Syed Zaeem Hosain (Syed.Hosain@aeris.net)]

Darn! I just noticed that I am having trouble displaying any text in Type 1 fonts in Word documents - they are all displaying as Arial, although the font metrics from the original Type 1 font are making it "display" very poorly.

I wonder if this is related in any way to what you experienced too? Perhaps unrelated, but I was wondering what was going on in Word ... all OTF and TTF fonts are "displaying" fine, but Type 1 are not.

I will try a printout on our printer here and see it exhibits the same issue too.

(I replaced all my Arial use with Helvetica quite a while back, based on input from this list ... going back would be equally painful.)

Z

Mike Wickham wrote:

I thought I might post a solution to a problem that I encountered recently, since it involves the Type 1 Helvetica font, and many of us have installed it. I was having major problems with Internet Explorer
(10) not being able to load many websites. It would load them partially, not at all, or loaded links would not work.

This drove me nuts for a while as I tried to figure out if I had a broken flash player or something else going on. I finally stumbled upon the cause and solution online. Apparently, Microsoft changed its font rendering engine in IE 9. That in combination with Windows 7 has done something to break the ability of IE to render websites that have Helvetica specified as a font.

So if you see this problem yourself, the solution is to uninstall Type 1 Helvetica. Since many of us have PostScript printers, we have installed this font on our computers. The recommendation is to replace with a TrueType or OpenType version instead. The cost of OTF Helvetica is ridiculous, though. So hello Arial.

If you create websites, you may want to leave Type 1 fonts out of your code or your IE visitors may not be able to see your site!

Here's a link to a page describing the problem:
http://bobbyjoneswebdesign.blogspot.com/2011/12/internet-explorer-9-type-1-font-bug.html

Mike Wickham