Helvetica Unicode font

[_Mikael_Sten_]

I am looking for a Helvetica Unicode font, to be used in FrameMaker 8, Windows.
It has to be able to support all characters in the following alphabets:
Hungarian, Slovak, Estonian and Romanian.

Does anyone know about a font that works?
Regards
Mikael

[_Kenneth_Benson_]

Arial is almost Helvetica. There's a good comparison at
http://www.ms-studio.com/articlesarialsid.html.

I don't know anything about Estonian, but I know Arial has all the CE
characters, and I would guess it covers Estonian as well, since it
covers just about everything else.

I'm a snob about fonts; I would always choose Helvetica over Arial. More
to the point, there are a lot of typefaces I would choose over each one
(unless I was designing road signs). But if I needed CE glyphs, and I
had to use Helvetica, Arial would be a pretty good compromise.

--
Kenneth Benson
Pegasus Type, Inc.
www.pegtype.com

[AxialInfo]

Mikael, if you haven't yet checked it, there is a Typography forum on the Adobe site where you might get some excellent feedback.

http://www.adobeforums.com/cgi-bin/webx?14@@.eea5b3a

[_Mikael_Sten_]

Thanks both!
I guess Arial will work, even if Helvetica is what was decided to use.
I'll check out the Typography forum asap. Sounds great!

[_david1]

Looking on Michael Everson's "Alphabets of Europe" pages (http://www.evertype.com ), he lists Estonian as using s and z with carons, a, o and u with diareses, and o with tildes.
I have a "Helvetica Neue" OpenType font that I bought from http://www.linotype.com which includes all these characters.

[_david1]

(Ah - I see you are looking for characters used Slovak, Hungarian and Roumanian too... I haven't time to check these right now, but I expect that Linotype's Helvetica Neue will have them - Helvetica is one of that foundry's most popular fonts so I would expect them to...)

[_Mats_Broberg_]

Mikael,

Swiss721 is Bitstream's pan-European WGL4 version of Helvetica. It should work fine in yoru case.

Best wishes,
Mats Broberg

[_Mikael_Sten_]

Hi Mats,
I am looking at the Unicode character maps of Swiss721, but I cannot find some characters. Most missing characters are in Hungerian and Slovakian, where the characters that are combined by two letters are missing:
cs, dz, dzs, gy, ly, ny, sz, ty and zs in Hungerian.
d', dz, dz with a roof over z, ch, l' and some more in Slovakian.

Or am I missing something?
Regards
Mikael

[_Mikael_Sten_]

Hi again Mats,
After some reading on the Unicode FAQ I now know that Unicode character set do not include bi- and trigraph characters.
I guess that the Swiss 721 font will do then.
Or Linotypes Helvetica World.
Regards
Mikael

[_Mats_Broberg_]

Hi Mikael,

Swiss 721 has WGL4 coverage. WGL4 covers the following:

http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/WGL4.htm

For Hungarian publications, we have used this typeface for several years, with no problem. Neither translators nor agents or customers have remarked that there were any missing glyphs in our content.

Which Unicode values do you refer to?

Best regards,
Mats Broberg

[_Mikael_Sten_]

Hi Mats,
The bi- and trigraph characters (dz, dzs, cs, gy, ly, etc in Hungerian) are not represented in Unicode, though they are to be treated as single characters.
This according to:
http://www.unicode.org/faq/ligature_digraph.html#3
where it says "...At this point, the UTC has a default position: no new characters for digraphs or pre-composed diacritic letters should be accepted for encoding as individual characters."

Regards
Mikael

[fulopattila122]

First, HungArian and not HungErian.

In Hungarian dz, dzs, cs, gy etc are pronounced and mostly treated as single consonants, but they're simply composed from writing the appropriate letters after each other. It's something like `sh` in English or `sch` in German. So don't look for them in Unicode or anywhere else, because it doesn't exist. The extra Hungarian characters are btw á, é, í, ó, ö, ő, ú, ü, ű.

I still couldn't find Helvetica Neue with all the Romanian and Hungarian characters. Do you know any place where it can be bought for being used on a website? Or any good alternative apart from Arial?

[fulopattila122]

As an alternative Interval Sans Pro might be a good choice as has Light and Thin weights, and contains all the mentioned characters. Is a bit wider though..

Update: It turns out that the `Neue Helvetica` (sic!) variants on fonts.com have these characters if you choose the Latin Ext 1 variants, even if the website specimen doesn't display those characters.