>As to the widespread notion that Microsoft did not want to pay licensing fees, Allan Haley has publicly stated, more than once, that the amount of money Micros

>As to the widespread notion that Microsoft did not want to pay licensing fees, Allan Haley has publicly stated, more than once, that the amount of money Microsoft paid over the years for the development of Arial could finance a small country. The money Microsoft paid mostly went to the _man-years_ of development effort towards hinting, so if Helvetica had been chosen, that would have been even more expensive. There were several reasons not to choose the Linotype design Helvetica: - Linotype had recently sued Microsoft for trademark infringement over the "Tms Rmn" and "Helv" pixel fonts, and that loss still stung - Helvetica was being used by, and quite strongly associated with Microsoft's direct competitors Apple (it was a core font on the Apple Laserwriter, and even folks w/o access to those outlines would often use the quite nice pixel fonts of the various sizes of Helvetica and even more so with NeXT, since it was used as the UI font on NeXTstep (so as to better showcase their large/high resolution (for the time) screens _and_ it was part of their brand identity. EDIT: For an example of a company cheaping out on licensing Helvetica (and Times Roman), look to Adobe, Adobe Acrobat 4 which swapped in Times New Roman PS and a matching Arial in lieu of Linotype's Times Roman and Helvetica.