Ubuntu – Netbeans all menu fonts are bold after upgrade to 12.04

The Helvetica from Adobe fonts are not ttf so it's likely that it will be very ugly. You may replace them with something similar to Helvetica like fonts-freefont-ttf package, or use sans-serif, as described in the Debian FAQ:

nano -w ~/.fonts.conf

This will create the fonts file, now just put the following:

<?xml version="1.0"?> 
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">

<fontconfig>

<!-- Helvetica is a non true type font, and will look bad. This
replaces it with whatever is the default sans-serif font -->

<match target="pattern" name="family" >
<test name="family" qual="any" >
<string>Helvetica</string>
</test>
<edit mode="assign" name="family" >
<string>sans-serif</string>
</edit>
</match>
<dir>~/.fonts</dir>

</fontconfig>

This will replace any finding to the helvetica font for sans-serif.