Blue Pencil no. 18–Some history about Arial

Summary

Blue Pencil no. 18—Some history about Arial I have moved the third portion of Matthew Carter’s email to me regarding Just My Type (see Blue Pencil no. 17—Correction) to a separate post since it was not a correction but a further elucidation of a commment I made. And I have paired it with Rod McDonald’s follow-up email (formerly Blue Pencil no. 17—Addendum). Matthew Carter: Somewhere there must be a proper account of the beginnings of Arial, but at the risk of repeating myself or somebody else, here goes. In the late ’70s or 1980 (I’m not sure of the exact date) Xerox and IBM released the first laser-xerographic printers, the Xerox 9700 (300 dpi resolution), and the IBM 3800 (240 dpi resolution). Xerox made an agreement with Mergenthaler to license bitmaps of Times Roman and Helvetica for the 9700. IBM went to Monotype (the only real alternative to Linotype) to license the same faces (in addition to versions of the monospaced fonts they had used in the previous generation of impact printers). Monotype had rights to Times Roman, of course, but not to Helvetica. The contract with IBM was worth a colossal amount of money and Monotype, in one of their periodic financial difficulties, proposed to make what amounted to a Helvetica clone, based ostensibly on their Grots 215 and 216. I was a consultant to IBM’s Printer Planning Division at the time and had the job of going through print-outs of all the Monotype bitmaps to make necessary corrections with red and green pencils. Arial was originally called Sonoran Sans during its development but I believe that IBM used the name Arial by the time it was released. At a later time Microsoft acquired the rights of access to Monotype’s type library. This was in return for guaranteeing a loan to Monotype (again in financial trouble), a deal brokered by Robert Norton at Microsoft. Through this deal Microsoft picked up Arial. One point I’m not clear about—but should be given my job as consultant—is whether IBM’s Sonoran/Arial had exact...