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Arial Font Complete Family Pack: A Comprehensive Review and Comparison with Other Fonts



In 1992 it was for the first time used in a personal computer for Windows 3.1. Within no time, it became a default font for Excel, Powerpoint, Word, etc. Today, there is no one who has never come across this font, be it a student or a professional designer. In all these years, the Arial font family has released many variants, including Arial Black, Arial Rounded, Arial Narrow, Arial Light, Medium, etc.


Many big and small companies and organizations have made this font their preference in all these years. It is a huge font family that makes this typeface versatile, so it can be used on almost every possible platform. This is a safe choice that can be made in designs, publications, and magazines. It has an easy-to-read appearance that goes best for the body text.




Arial Font Complete Family Pack



Arial (also called Arial MT) is a sans-serif typeface and set of computer fonts in the neo-grotesque style. Fonts from the Arial family are included with all versions of Microsoft Windows from Windows 3.1 on, some other Microsoft software applications,[2] Apple's macOS[3] and many PostScript 3 computer printers.[4] The typeface was designed in 1982, by Robin Nicholas and Patricia Saunders, for Monotype Typography.[5] Each of its characters has the same width as that character in the popular typeface Helvetica; the purpose of this design is to allow a document designed in Helvetica to be displayed and printed with the intended line-breaks and page-breaks without a Helvetica license. Because of their almost identical appearances, both Arial and Helvetica have commonly been mistaken for each other.


The Arial typeface comprises many styles: Regular, Italic, Medium, Medium Italic, Bold, Bold Italic, Black, Black Italic, Extra Bold, Extra Bold Italic, Light, Light Italic, Narrow, Narrow Italic, Narrow Bold, Narrow Bold Italic, Condensed, Light Condensed, Bold Condensed, and Extra Bold Condensed. The extended Arial type family includes more styles: Rounded (Light, Regular, Bold, Extra Bold); Monospaced (Regular, Oblique, Bold, Bold Oblique). Many of these have been issued in multiple font configurations with different degrees of language support. The most widely used and bundled Arial fonts are Arial Regular, Italic, Bold, and Bold Italic; the same styles of Arial Narrow; and Arial Black. More recently, Arial Rounded has also been widely bundled.


IBM debuted two printers for the in-office publishing market in 1982: the 240-DPI 3800-3 laserxerographic printer, and the 600-DPI 4250 electro-erosion laminate typesetter.[13][14] Monotype was under contract to supply bitmap fonts for both printers.[10][13] The fonts for the 4250, delivered to IBM in 1983,[15] included Helvetica, which Monotype sub-licensed from Linotype.[13] For the 3800-3, Monotype replaced Helvetica with Arial.[13] The hand-drawn Arial artwork was completed in 1982 at Monotype by a 10-person team led by Robin Nicholas and Patricia Saunders[6][16] and was digitized by Monotype at 240 DPI expressly for the 3800-3.[17]


IBM named the font Sonoran Sans Serif due to licensing restrictions and the manufacturing facility's location (Tucson, Arizona, in the Sonoran Desert),[10][18] and announced in early 1984 that the Sonoran Sans Serif family, "a functional equivalent of Monotype Arial", would be available for licensed use in the 3800-3 by the fourth quarter of 1984. There were initially 14 point sizes, ranging from 6 to 36, and four style/weight combinations (Roman medium, Roman bold, italic medium, and italic bold), for a total of 56 fonts in the family. Each contained 238 graphic characters, providing support for eleven national languages: Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish. Monotype and IBM later expanded the family to include 300-DPI bitmaps and characters for additional languages.


Mac OS X (now known as macOS) was the first Mac OS version to include Arial; it was not included in classic Mac OS. The operating system ships with Arial, Arial Black, Arial Narrow, and Arial Rounded MT. However, the default macOS font for sans-serif/Swiss generic font family is Helvetica. The bundling of Arial with Windows and macOS has contributed to it being one of the most widely distributed and used typefaces in the world.


In 1996, Microsoft launched the Core fonts for the Web project to make a standard pack of fonts for the Internet. Arial in TrueType format was included in this project. The project allowed anyone to download and install these fonts for their own use (on end user's computers) without any fee. The project was terminated by Microsoft in August 2002, allegedly due to frequent EULA violations.[30][31][32] For MS Windows, the core fonts for the web were provided as self-extracting executables (.exe); each included an embedded cabinet file, which can be extracted with appropriate software. For the Macintosh, the files were provided as BinHexed StuffIt archives (.sit.hqx). The latest font version that was available from Core fonts for the Web was 2.82, published in 2000. Later versions (such as version 3 or version 5 which include many new characters) were not available from this project. A Microsoft spokesman declared in 2002 that members of the open-source community "will have to find different sources for updated fonts. ... Although the EULA did not restrict the fonts to just Windows and Mac OS, they were only ever available as Windows .exe's and Mac archive files."[30] The chief technical officer of Opera Software cited the cancellation of the project as an example of Microsoft resisting interoperability.[33]


but you must have installed the package called uarial (not arial) beforehand. If you do not have this package then install it with sudo getnonfreefonts --sys -a, which will install all available non-free fonts into your system (more info here). The script was part of TeXLive until the 2009 version. Ubuntu users should have it already installed.


Times New Roman is a commonly-used font and here's an example of its use on Overleaf via the XeLaTeX compiler. In this example, the document font is set using \usemainfontTimes New Roman, where the command \usemainfont... is provided by the package fontspec.


After uploading the font-family files into Overleaf project folders we can configure them for use via fontspec. In the following LaTeX code, note how we have used the Path parameter to tell fontspec that the font files are located in a local folder within our project's file system:


You should give pacman the ability to manage your fonts, which is done by creating an Arch package. These can also be shared with the community in the AUR. The packages to install fonts are particularly similar; see Font packaging guidelines.


If you are seeing errors similar to this and/or seeing blocks instead of characters in your application then you need to add fonts and update the font cache. This example uses the ttf-liberation fonts to illustrate the solution (after successful installation of the package) and runs as root to enable them system-wide.


Almost all Unicode fonts contain the Greek character set (polytonic included). Some additional font packages, which might not contain the complete Unicode set but utilize high quality Greek (and Latin, of course) typefaces are:


Kaomoji are sometimes referred to as "Japanese emoticons" and are composed of characters from various character sets, including CJK and Indic fonts. For example, the following set of packages covers most of existing kaomoji: gnu-free-fonts, ttf-arphic-uming, and ttf-indic-otf.


I'm using ggplot2 in R to generate figures for a publication in which all figures need to be .eps format and all fonts needs to be Arial. I've been following this guide to doing this using the extrafont package. As I understand it, the line loadfonts(device = "postscript") should register all of the fonts I imported (which includes Arial) with the postscript device. But when I run my code and try to save my figure using this code:


svglite produces SVG files containing plain text but fonts are stillimportant for plot generation and rendering. Fonts are used during SVGgeneration to figure out the metrics of graphical elements. The fontname is then recorded in the font-family property of textanchors so that SVG renderers know what fonts to use. svglite does tryto ensure a consistent figure rendering even when fonts are notavailable at the time of rendering (by supplying the textLengthSVG text attribute). However, the text may look slightly distorted whena fallback font is used. This means that for optimal display, the fontmust be available on both the computer used to create the svg, and thecomputer used to render the svg. The defaults are fonts that areavailable on almost all systems: there may be small differences betweenthem, but they are unlikely to cause problems in most causes.


The Noto fontset providedby Google as well as the Han Sansfamily by Adobe have excellent coverage but may not be available atthe time of rendering. This can be a concern if you distribute the SVGfiles on the Internet.


In addition to system fonts, you can also provide fonts that are notnecessarily installed on the system (i.e., fonts that live in userspace). The main reason to do this is to generate reproducible SVG filesas different platforms can have different versions of a font and thusproduce different text metrics. The user_fonts argumentstakes either paths to font files, fonts from the fontquiverpackage, or a list that specifies the alias. Whereassystem_fonts gets a named list of families as argument,user_fonts takes a named tree of lists of families(sans, serif, mono andsymbol) and faces (plain, italic,bold, bolditalic, symbol):


fontquiver fonts are particularly useful for creatingreproducible SVG files. The vdiffr package uses svglitewith fontquiver fonts to create visual unit tests reliably acrossplatforms. The Liberation fontset is appropriate for this usage becauseit features all 12 combinations of standard R families and faces. Inaddition fontquiver provides Symbola for the symbol font. The functionfontquiver::font_families() produces a list with theappropriate structure and can be directly supplied to svglite: 2ff7e9595c


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