A grant proposal is due Friday, the whole thing is typeset in LaTeX, and the figure labels have to match Helvetica-set body copy without anyone spotting the substitution. TeX Gyre Heros, drawn by Bogusław Jackowski and Janusz M. Nowacki at the GUST e-foundry, exists for exactly that job. It is a grotesque sans in the Nimbus Sans line, metric-compatible as a Helvetica alternative, so column widths and line breaks survive the swap.

Eight files come in the family, spanning multiple weights and styles plus condensed cuts for places where horizontal room is scarce: narrow table columns in annual reports, running heads in technical manuals, dense legends on conference posters. Latin coverage reaches past 322 languages, which matters if you publish the same engineering documentation in Polish, Czech, and Turkish. Designers reach for it in SaaS dashboard UI labels too, where a neutral grotesque keeps numbers and small captions quiet.

One practical note: the regular weight sits comfortably at caption and body sizes with no extra tracking, but once you push past 48 points for a headline or a cover, tighten the letterspacing a notch, since spacing tuned for reading looks airy at display size. Released under the GUST Font License (LPPL 1.3c): open license, commercial use allowed, direct download below.