Arial font on forms has letters overlapping each other

Question

When you lay out a form in InDesgin, you do not get a choice to change the fonts. This comes over as times, so in Acrobat I change to Arial.  I have down this before and never had an error, but this time said something like unlicensed font cannot be embedded.
If I change the font to Arial Black, works good, but if I change back to arial get the overlap.
I really am just looking for a readable sans font for the forms fields everyone has, why can't I choose Adobe Sans as the font? Don't want to go back to square one, because there are a lot of scripts added in acrobat, after making the InDesgin PDF.
Seems the OS often installs both Arial & Arial MT. Was thinking of switching to Arial MT, but same problem happens with Arial MT. Might be some kind of FOND ID corruption, will reset the font cache, restart computer and try, but am wondering what other people use for form fields as the serif fonts just do not read as well.

Answer 1

Mike,
Helvetica is one of the so-called base-14 fonts. These fonts, or suitable replacements, are guaranteed to be available to conforming PDF viewers. What this means is the system fonts are not used, but rather private versions are. The base-14 fonts include Times, Helvetica, Courier (and their bold/italic variants), Symbol, and Zapf Dingbats . As mentioned previously, Adobe use ArialMT as the suitable replacement for Helvetica, so you end up getting Arial anyway.
To change the font of all the text fields, you can use a script. This is something you should get used to if you're creating the fields in InDesign since it doesn't allow you to set all of the field properties. The script would look something like:
// Loop through the fields and set text field font to Helvetica
for (var i = 0; i < numFields; i++) {
    var f = getField(getNthFieldName(i));
    if (f.type === "text") {
        f.textFont = font.Helv;
You can run this script in the JavaScript console, or a temporary button, etc.