Fonts & Character Sets ⇒ Helvetica in cyrillic

[buenasdiaz]

I tried to use helvetica in a document with russian text, but obtained only formulas in helvetica.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[english,russian]{babel}
\usepackage[T2A]{fontenc}
...
\usepackage{fourier}
\usepackage[scaled]{helvet}
...

I got the following:
LaTeX Font Warning: Some font shapes were not available, defaults substituted.

[frabjous]

I don't really know the solution to your problem, but a few observations:

1. Generally the helvet package only sets the sans font as Helvetica. It doesn't touch the roman font. To change the main text to sans you need to put in:

\renewcommand*{\familydefault}{\sfdefault}

2. I could be wrong, but I don't think the generic PostScript version of Helvetica that comes with LaTeX supports the T2A encoding, and I'm not sure the T1 encoding it's usually used with supports Cyrillic characters. Indeed, I'm not sure these characters are even present in these fonts. I hope I'm wrong about that.

If it were me, I'd probably switch to XeLaTeX with the fontspec/mathspec packages and use regular system fonts. If you don't have a commercial Helvetica font, you could find substitutes no doubt. Surprisingly, TeX Gyre Heros doesn't seem to support Cyrillic either, but you could use, e.g., Liberation Sans, which is very close to Helvetica.

[buenasdiaz]

Thank you very much frabjous. I have done exactly what you proposed and got the result which I like.