Disabling Arial in favour of Helvetica on Mac OS X (Safari)

"In Activity Monitor, use Get Info on the browser you are using, and look at the open files:

That will show you where the font is being taken from. I suspect that the new technologies in Leopard/Snow Leopard to activate fonts on demand are what are causing Arial to come back, and without forcibly erasing all existance of it, I'm not sure what you can do. You could use an applescript to move arial out of the font library, then start your browser, and another applescript to close your browser then move arial back.

Do note however that Browsers like Opera and Firefox can apply custom user styles (per-site built-in to opera), so you can easily override arial on sites you choose. I often restyle sites to use fonts I choose - very powerful and useful for typography nerds like us.

Also if you want a brutal shotgun approach, use a bookmarklet (copy as an address and make a bookmark out of it, clicking it will test it on this page):

javascript:void(document.body.style.fontFamily='helvetica!important')

And back to Arial:

javascript:void(document.body.style.fontFamily='arial!important')

This bookmarklet is even more brutal, will change everything on a page to helvetica

javascript:for(i=0;i<document.getElementsByTagName('*').length;i++){document.getElementsByTagName('*')[i].style.fontFamily='georgia'};return;

And, as you may find something useful, the most comprehensive and useful guide on font management for OS X:

http://www.jklstudios.com/misc/osxfonts.html"