Being Mr. Kenny

For a while now I have been harbouring a terrible, shameful secret.

It’s so terrible, I’m just going to come out and say it. I, Mark Kenny, am completely addicted to Arial, Microsoft’s rip-off copy of the Helvetica typeface. Any typographic designer worth his salt will eagerly tell you how the bowls, tails and x-heights have been changed — but only very slightly — to allow Microsoft to use the typeface without having to pay royalties. This change is widely regarded, from what I can tell, as plagiarism on Microsoft’s part, but I don’t really care.

The truth is that everybody has Arial installed on their systems, which means that you can trust that web-pages written in the font will show up correctly.

This is true in most cases. However, I recently re-installed Kubuntu Linux, and though it has rapidly become my OS of choice, I have not found the default font, ‘DejaVu’, quite so attractive. For one thing, my website doesn’t show up in lovely, graceful, super-legible Arial when I’m viewing it in Konqueror (rock on KHTML!).

To rectify this, I have committed the most terrible sacrilege. I installed nasty, appropriated, proprietary Arial on my otherwise pristine, pure, open source system. I’m still waiting for the sky to fall in on me, or worse, a virus to exploit the numerous security holes that inevitably riddle any file created by Microsoft. (This last clause is my desperate attempt to make me sound like a good little Linux user.)

I wonder if there is anything I can do about my problem. I have tried using Garuda, which looks remarkably similar to Arial, but it just doesn’t quite hit the mark. I’ve even looked at samples of Helvetica (since you can only get the real thing at a cost) in the hopes that its inherent beauty will make me repentent, but you know what — and this is when the typographical secret police start knocking at my door — I actually prefer Microsoft’s cheap knock-off replacement.

Related ramblings: Akzidenz Grotesk, the forefather of Helvetica and therefore Arial, was first created in 1898. I found it quite surprising that such an informal, modern-looking typeface could have been designed over 100 years ago.