Helvetica neue bold not showing in illustrator
![helvetica neue bold not showing in illustrator helvetica neue bold not showing in illustrator](https://community.adobe.com/legacyfs/online/1626031_pastedImage_0.png)
- HELVETICA NEUE BOLD NOT SHOWING IN ILLUSTRATOR MAC OS X
- HELVETICA NEUE BOLD NOT SHOWING IN ILLUSTRATOR PDF
- HELVETICA NEUE BOLD NOT SHOWING IN ILLUSTRATOR PLUS
The samples you provided show text that is heavily hinted, and the mistake on the top of the lowercase "x" leads me to believe that Illustrator is auto-hinting it. As a consequence anything different to what you are used to probably looks wrong (as does bad hinting also look wrong).
HELVETICA NEUE BOLD NOT SHOWING IN ILLUSTRATOR MAC OS X
Operating Systems vary wildly in their level of hinting with Windows doing it very strongly, and Mac OS X doing hardly any of it at all. The hinting of on-screen text helps make the stems and bars of the text more distinct and sharper, by shifting them to align with the pixel grid. As a result, vertical "stems" don't look very crisp at small sizes. Most OSs these days employ sub-pixel antialiasing which is the most "crisp" type because it triples the horizontal resolution, whereas your sample does not show anti sub-pixel anti-aliasing. The anti-aliasing of on-screen text helps prevent ugly letter shapes as a result of the rasterisation but there are multiple types of anti-aliasing. If Illustrator rendered it a lot "nicer" to you, it'd still not be giving a very good preview of what the output would be, since the screen's rasterised display is very much a limiting factor to get a good preview of the letter-shapes you need to zoom in very close, and to get a good preview of how it looks printed - you have to print it. The good news is that it usually doesn't matter to the end result when in Illustrator you are more concerned about the vector output it produces, not how it looks in Illustrator rasterised for your screen. Illustrator here is applying a different level of hinting or anti-aliasing to what you normally see in your operating system, so it looks different (and to you, looks wrong, for there is much research on the topic of people getting used to the way their chosen OS renders text, and everything else looking wrong). These are both intended to make the text more readable on-screen. Text that is rendered on-screen usually has some level of hinting and anti-aliasing applied. Hinted text is usually better for readability, but in some cases like these, it does go badly wrong. Or, apply the text in Photoshop and make use of its anti-aliasing controls.
HELVETICA NEUE BOLD NOT SHOWING IN ILLUSTRATOR PLUS
On CS4 for in-image text for web output, the workaround I'd recommend is to copy screenshots of the on-screen preview at 100% to Photoshop when you do want hinting, and using Save For Web plus the Pixel Align script when you don't want hinting, and where appropriate combine the two images in Photoshop, overlaying them and erasing areas of one where you want the rendering of the other.
![helvetica neue bold not showing in illustrator helvetica neue bold not showing in illustrator](https://i.stack.imgur.com/cZL3e.png)
On CS6, you have control over these things. Sometimes it'll be an improvement, sometimes it might make the text rendering worse, sometimes it'll make no difference. But there's a certain amount of randomness to this. Note also how aligning the text object to the pixel grid does make a small difference when hinting is off (e.g. (I can't find anything spelling out exactly what each anti-aliasing method does - it looks like 'Crisp' and 'Strong' may actually be turning Illustrator's hinting off, or at least, dampening it down) You can see the ugly distortion, lowering flat-topped letters and raising round-topped letters, appearing when hinting is on and when anti-aliasing is 'Sharp', regardless of whether the object itself is aligned to the pixel grid - because the hinting (adjusting details to fit the pixel grid) is happening at the level of each detail of each character, not the text object itself. Without hinting (i.e.'Art optimised' save for web, or less than CS4 save for web ): onscreen preview, or, in CS5+, save for web with "Type Optimised" selected) In Illustrator CS5+ there are options for how type is anti-aliased similar to those in Photoshop, so we can compare the combinations (top rows are 10 Helvetica Neue Light, bottom rows 14pt), of which CS4 appears to only use 'Sharp': This particular case, however, is a combination of the particular type of anti-aliasing and hinting.
HELVETICA NEUE BOLD NOT SHOWING IN ILLUSTRATOR PDF
I am trying to change the matplotlib font to helvetica, which I'd like to use in a PDF plot.