“My PDF will prob­a­bly be read on screen. Shouldn’t I use a screen-op­ti­mized sys­tem font?” No. In Win­dows, cer­tain sys­tem fonts (e.g., Geor­gia, Cal­ibri) have been op­ti­mized by Mi­crosoft for user-in­ter­face pur­poses. This is ac­com­plished with hint­ing, which is ex­tra soft­ware code stored in the font it­self. Win­dows re­lies on this hint­ing when it draws text on screen (e.g., in Mi­crosoft Word, or in a web browser).

Due to ad­vances in dis­play tech­nol­ogy, the screen-leg­i­bil­ity ad­van­tage of these par­tic­u­lar sys­tem fonts is rapidly evap­o­rat­ing—see screen-read­ing con­sid­er­a­tions for why. Fur­ther­more, any PDF could also end up be­ing printed. There­fore, as a rule, you’re bet­ter off us­ing print-op­ti­mized fonts for PDFs.

“But if I use a print-op­ti­mized pro­fes­sional font in my PDF in­stead of a sys­tem font, my read­ers prob­a­bly won’t have the same font in­stalled.” Right. But it doesn’t mat­ter. When you gen­er­ate a PDF, your fonts are em­bed­ded in the PDF to pre­serve the formatting.

This is not true, how­ever, on the web. Web browsers use the text ren­der­ing of the op­er­at­ing sys­tem. Thus, in Win­dows browsers, screen-op­ti­mized sys­tem fonts have tra­di­tion­ally held an ad­van­tage, be­cause they look good and they’re al­ready in­stalled. (In­deed, the Mi­crosoft fonts Geor­gia and Ver­dana were specif­i­cally cre­ated for web use.) But this ad­van­tage is rapidly fad­ing with the ad­vent of screen-op­ti­mized web­fonts and the gen­eral shift to­ward higher-res­o­lu­tion screens. Still, for now, us­ing pro­fes­sional fonts on a web­site re­quires a lit­tle more leg­work than it does in PDF.

Yes, I dis­like Ar­ial more than Comic Sans. Though it’s the undis­puted king of the goofy fonts, Comic Sans is at least hon­est about what it is. But Ar­ial is merely a bland, zero-calo­rie Hel­vetica substitute.

For many, the two are in­dis­tin­guish­able. But for ty­pog­ra­phers, Ar­ial con­tains none of the con­sis­tency and bal­ance that makes Hel­vetica successful.

Still, the main is­sue is overuse. Af­ter decades as a sys­tem font, Ar­ial has achieved a ubiq­uity that ri­vals Times New Ro­man. And like Times New Ro­man, Ar­ial is per­ma­nently as­so­ci­ated with the work of peo­ple who will never care about typography.

You’re not one of those peo­ple. So use Avenir. Use Franklin Gothic. Use Gill Sans. Use one of the fonts listed in Hel­vetica and Ar­ial al­ter­na­tives. Or use some­thing com­pletely dif­fer­ent. But don’t use Ar­ial. It’s the sans serif of last resort.