A long, long time ago we used to have this huge hand held machine at work that looked a bit like the Starship Enterprise. It was used to create long strips of characters that could then be pasted onto sheets of A4 and eventually turned into leaflets. I have no idea what it was called. But I do remember my favourite type face was Helvetica.

Now today, I’m doing some work using Open Office.org 1.1.0 and I realised that it doesn’t have Arial font in it, and in looking for a replacement, I re-discovered Helvetica (ok, this shows I’m not a Mac user, although I have been in the past). And….this leads to a question as to whether Helvetica is in Microsoft Office. No - because Microsoft a long time ago chose Arial because it was cheaper.

Which is a shame because Helvetica is a much more pleasing font.

There’s a useful article here which explains the history - http://www.ms-studio.com/articles.html