Is helvetica hardcoded somewhere in pdf generation scripts? Is there way to change it?

[esweeney]

Is there a way to change the font in pdfs?

[ChrisG]

Assuming you are asking about integrated PDF generation in Splunk 5. There is not a way to change the default font. You can change to non-Latin fonts for other languages (see Enable usage of non-Latin fonts in PDFs), but that is the extent of the font configuration at this time.