Helvetica is a rather popular font, but due to its license, it’s not available on all platforms, e.g.
Debian/Linux. There are a few alternatives, though.
As we can see, both Free Helvetian
and Nimbus Sans L
are pretty close. Nimbus Sans
is slightly thiner, but works perfectly as a substitute.
(Actually, Nimbus Sans
is the substitute for Helvetica
on my Debian/Linux.) Even though the first two share the largest resemblance with
Helvetica
, they are only available in PostScript (pfb
) format, which has been mostly rendered obsolete by OpenType. Therefore, I suggest using
Nimbus Sans
as the alternative to Helvetica
.
The source of the pdf is shown below. One should compile it using xelatex main.tex
. If you system doesn’t have Helvetica
yet, you can download it
from https://www.fontmirror.com/helvetica for testing purpose. (Don’t forget to update the path to it in the tex file.)
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 \documentclass [12pt] {report} \usepackage [top=2cm,left=0cm,centering,paperheight=5in] {geometry} \usepackage {fontspec} \newfontfamily \nimbussanslfont {Nimbus Sans L} \newfontfamily \freehelvetian {Free Helvetian} \newfontfamily \nimbussans {Nimbus Sans} \newfontfamily \helvetica [Path=/home/albert/Downloads/] {Helvetica.ttf} \newfontfamily \freesansfont {FreeSans} \newfontfamily \dejavuansfont {DejaVu Sans} \begin {document} \begin {LARGE} \begin {helvetica} The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog Helvetica \end {helvetica} \begin {freehelvetian} The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog Free Helvetian \end {freehelvetian} \begin {helvetica} The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog Helvetica \end {helvetica} \begin {nimbussanslfont} The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog Nimbus Sans L \end {nimbussanslfont} \begin {helvetica} The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog Helvetica \end {helvetica} \begin {nimbussans} The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog Nimbus Sans \end {nimbussans} \begin {helvetica} The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog Helvetica \end {helvetica} \begin {freesansfont} The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog Free Sans \end {freesansfont} \begin {helvetica} The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog Helvetica \end {helvetica} \begin {dejavuansfont} The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog DejaVu Sans \end {dejavuansfont} \end {LARGE} \thispagestyle {empty} \end {document}