Helvetica disappearing!

[Schlogg]

One of my customers (Citrix on Win NT4.) uses FileMaker Pro. I developed most of their databases and generally used my favourite font - Helvetica. One day, it just disappeared. Unfortunately, we cannot pin down the date when the disappearing happened; FMP does a great job of substituting and we only found the disappearance by accident.
I tried copying it from my Win98 machine but, of course, they're not compatible.
Now I've upgraded to W2K and, guess what, Helvetica has disappeared from my machine.
Anyone with any clues about this?
(My own suspicion is that MS used to have a licence for it and lost the licence and so delete it when you upgrade or patch.)


Cheers,
Paul J.

 

[DansDadUK]

I don't think that Helvetica is one of the standard built-in Windows fonts, which is probably why it doesn't appear on your W2K syustem.

It will usually be installed on a system if you install the drivers for a modern HP printer (e.g. HP4200), as part of the set of screen fonts which match the printer resident fonts.
If you do a Custom install, rather than the Default install, you'll be able to see the Fonts option (as well as being able to select drivers for PCL5 and PostScript, in addition to the default PCL6 one), although I think that the fonts do get installed by default anyway.

With older printers, you used to have to obtain and run the HP FontSmart tool to load in the matching screen fonts.

 

[Schlogg]

Thanks for that info. I have a new (<1yr) Lexmark and I am pretty sure I had Helvetica here after installing Win2K but I can't remember.
Got it! I had a Lexmark laser printer which I removed and replaced with an inkjet.
My customer replaced printers some time back - within a year or so of not finding the missing font.
So now I (think I) know how I caught the plague; next is to cure it.

Cheers,
Paul J.