How to force pdflatex to use Helvetica rather than NimbusSan

[jamj...@gmail.com]

I am using MikTeX 2.9 on a Windows machine.

I wish to make sure that the PDF output of pdflatex uses Helvetica rather than substituting it by NimbusSan.

My minimal example

\documentclass{book}
\usepackage{helvet}

\begin{document}

\thispagestyle{empty}

\sffamily Hello world

\end{document}

produces a PDF in which I can see (from "document properties" in Adobe Acrobat) that the font is NimbusSan.

If I compile the same file first to DVI and then use DVIPS and then convert the ps file to pdf the resulting file does use Helvetica.

Is there a way, please, that I can "force" pdflatex to use Helvetica?

Many thanks

James Keeler

[Axel Berger]

jamj...@gmail.com wrote:
> produces a PDF in which I can see (from "document properties" in Adobe Acrobat) that the font is NimbusSan.
>
> If I compile the same file first to DVI and then use DVIPS and then convert the ps file to pdf the resulting file does use Helvetica.

One explanation coming to mind is that in the first case the font is
embedded (as it ought to be) and Nimbus is the only TeX variant of
Helvetica you have installed, while in the second no font is embedded at
all and the _viewer_ substitutes one of the big 14. If I'm right the
result may well be very bad microspacing.

Axel

[Lee Rudolph]

Fonts are mysterious to me, but I can make a few observations
that may have escaped you. (1) In psnfss2e.pdf (included in
the \doc\latex\psnfss directory distributed with MiKTeX 2.9),
the "Helvetica" is actually NimbusSan! (2) In 00readme.txt
(same directory), in the section "Fonts required for PSNFSS",
it is stated that "Free substitutes for the commercial PostScript
Base fonts are available from the CTAN directory fonts/urw/base35",
and a visit to that directory confirms that NimbusSan is the
'drop-in' replacement for Helvetica.

I am *guessing* that further, more informed reading of those
two documents may point you towards a solution.

Lee Rudolph