Arial is an extremely versatile family of typefaces which can be used with equal success for text setting in reports, presentations, magazines etc, and for display use in newspapers, advertising and promotions.In 2005, Robin Nicholas said, "It was designed as a generic sans serif; almost a bland sans serif.

"[7][8] Arial is a neo-grotesque typeface: a design based on nineteenth-century sans-serifs, but regularized to be more suited to continuous body text and to form a cohesive font family.

Apart from the need to match the character widths and approximate/general appearance of Helvetica, the letter shapes of Arial are also strongly influenced by Monotype's own Monotype Grotesque designs—released in the 1920s or earlier Venus in the mid-1900s with additional influence from "New Grotesque"—an abortive redesign from 1956.

[13] Monotype executive Allan Haley observed, "Arial was drawn more rounded than Helvetica, the curves softer and fuller and the counters more open.

"[11] Matthew Carter, a consultant for IBM during its design process, described it as "a Helvetica clone, based ostensibly on their Grots 215 and 216".

Arial Unicode MS uses monotone stroke widths on Arabic glyphs, similar to Tahoma.

Each contained 238 graphic characters, providing support for eleven national languages: Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish.

[citation needed] In the meantime, a company called Birmy marketed a version of Arial in a Type 1-compatible format.

[13][20] In 1990, Robin Nicholas, Patricia Saunders[7][17] and Steve Matteson developed a TrueType outline version of Arial which was licensed to Microsoft.

[16][17][23] Matthew Carter has noted that the deal was complex and included a bailout of Monotype, which was in financial difficulties, by Microsoft.

Monotype employee Rod McDonald noted:[24] As to the widespread notion that Microsoft did not want to pay licensing fees [for Helvetica], [Monotype director] 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.Arial ultimately became one of several clones of PostScript standard fonts created by Monotype in collaboration with or sold to Microsoft around this time, including Century Gothic (a clone of ITC Avant Garde), Book Antiqua (Palatino) and Bookman Old Style (ITC Bookman).

The font was dropped from Microsoft Office 2016 and has been deprecated; continuing growth of the number of characters in Unicode and limitations on the number of characters in a font meant that Arial Unicode could no longer perform the job it was originally created for.

The project allowed anyone to download and install these fonts for their own use (on end user's computers) without any fee.

[31][32][33] For MS Windows, the core fonts for the web were provided as self-extracting executables (.exe); each included an embedded cabinet file, which can be extracted with appropriate software.

A Microsoft spokesman declared in 2002 that members of the open-source community "will have to find different sources for updated fonts.

"[31] The chief technical officer of Opera Software cited the cancellation of the project as an example of Microsoft resisting interoperability.