Helvetica is one of the most famous and popular typefaces in the world. It lends an air of lucid efficiency to any typographic message with its clean, no-nonsense shapes. The original typeface was called Neue Haas Grotesk, and was designed in 1957 by Max Miedinger for the Haas'sche Schriftgiesserei (Haas Type Foundry) in Switzerland. In 1960 the name was changed to Helvetica (an adaptation of "Helvetia", the Latin name for Switzerland). Over the years, the original Helvetica family was expanded to include many different weights, but these were not as well coordinated with each other as they might have been. In 1983, D. Stempel AG and Linotype re-designed and digitized Neue Helvetica and updated it into a cohesive font family.
At the beginning of the 21st Century, Linotype again released an updated design of Helvetica, the Helvetica World typeface family. This family is much smaller in terms of its number of fonts, but each font makes up for this in terms of language support. Helvetica World supports a number of languages and writing systems from all over the globe.Helvetica World, an update to the classic Helvetica design using the OpenType font format, contains the following Microsoft code pages:1252 Latin 1, 1250 Latin 2 Eastern, 1251 Cyrillic, 1253 Greek, 1254 Turk, 1255 Hebrew, 1256 Arabic, 1257 Windows Baltic, 1258 Windows Vietnamese, as well as a mixture of box drawing element glyphs and mathematical symbols & operators. In total, each weight of Helvetica World contains 1866 different glyph characters!Many customers ask us what good non-Latin typefaces can be mixed with Helvetica World. Fortunately, Helvetica World already includes Greek, Cyrillic and a specially-designed Hebrew in its OpenType character set. But Linotype also offers a number of CJK fonts that can be matched with Helvetica World.Chinese fonts that pair well with Helvetica World:DF Hei (Simplified Chinese)DF Hei (Traditional Chinese)DF Li Hei (Traditional Chinese)DFP Hei (Simplified Chinese)Japanese fonts that pair well with Helvetica World:DF GothicDF Gothic PDFHS GothicKorean fonts that pair well with Helvetica World:DFK Gothic
