Hi Guys, does anyone know a free font that is pretty similar to Helvetica. Alternatively is there a website that you can download Helvetica free of charge. I'm doing a project based on The Co-Op and i'm pretty sure the font they use is Helvetica. If anyone knows of some similar fonts then that would be great.

Cheers,
Ant

The best substitute for Helvetica is Arial (this two font are very close) but it's not free.

Liberation Sans

http://www.fontspace.com/category/Helvetica

Or here in Dafont, Coolvetica, based in it: http://www.dafont.com/coolvetica.font

Thanks very much for your answers I also found Swansea on the fontface website is pretty good.

Arial is one of the default fonts of almost all operating systems. If you have an OS License, you have an arial font license

Mac OS and Linux too ?

yep

No clue...

No. Furthermore: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arial#Distribution

the BEST alternate for helvetica is akzidenz grotesque. it's the letterform that helvetica was based on and shares many of the same qualities, including a large family

http://thenextweb.com/dd/2012/05/17/30-of-the-best-alternatives-to-helvetica/

This isn't an alternate of Helvetica because Helvetica is based on Akzidenz Grotesk !

Arial isn't the default font in Macs but it's included under the name "Univers ER Mac".

Neue Haas Grotesk is a digitalised version of Helvetica original metal glyphes. More like the 50's swiss grotesque font before the success of photocomposition process.

@MatiereBleue : i said is ONE of the default font of mac os
@airtonix : ok, my bad, no linux...
@Everyone : May i remind that he was searching a font FREE OF CHARGE ?

Anyway, what's the point digging this 14 months old topic ?

I know it's an old thread but I did a study on this certain font for a project and it looked so much like Helvetica. I believe this has to be the closest. In fact, as it turned out, this was the precursor of Helvetica. It's free at ... fonts with a lot of regular variations. Kindly check it out and tell me about it. Ithink anybody looking for a font similar to Helvetica has to be this font. well it's called ... Check out the family at ... for free. I'm a novice in this but I sure can appreciate fonts and like clean, cut clear sexy undertones. in my fonts :

Hi Vinz, I have your (old) same problem. Have you found a similar free commercial font? I hope you can help my research. thanks a lot.

Hello everyone.
I suggest TeX Gyre Heros.
http://www.gust.org.pl/projects/e-foundry/tex-gyre/heros/index_html
TG Heros is a free (both as in "free beer" and in "free speech") alternate to Helvetica. It's based in Nimbus Sans L, which is supplied with GhostScript. It's metric-compatible with Arial too.
I use and recommend it.

Swansea https://www.fontspace.com/swansea-font-f5873

The best part is it's public domain.