Lucida (pronunciation: ) is an extended family of related

typeface A typeface (or font family) is the design of lettering that can include variations in size, weight (e.g. bold), slope (e.g. italic), width (e.g. condensed), and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font. There are list of type ...

s designed by Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes and released from 1984 onwards. The family is intended to be extremely legible when printed at small size or displayed on a low-resolution display – hence the name, from 'lucid' (clear or easy to understand). There are many variants of Lucida, including

serif In typography, a serif () is a small line or stroke regularly attached to the end of a larger stroke in a letter or symbol within a particular font or family of fonts. A typeface or "font family" making use of serifs is called a serif typeface ( ...

(Fax, Bright),

sans-serif In typography and lettering, a sans-serif, sans serif, gothic, or simply sans letterform is one that does not have extending features called "serifs" at the end of strokes. Sans-serif typefaces tend to have less stroke width variation than seri ...

(Sans, Sans Unicode, Grande, Sans Typewriter) and scripts (Blackletter, Calligraphy, Handwriting). Many are released with other software, most notably

Microsoft Office Microsoft Office, or simply Office, is the former name of a family of client software, server software, and services developed by Microsoft. It was first announced by Bill Gates on August 1, 1988, at COMDEX in Las Vegas. Initially a marketi ...

. Bigelow and Holmes, together with the (now defunct)

TeX Tex may refer to: People and fictional characters * Tex (nickname), a list of people and fictional characters with the nickname * Joe Tex (1933–1982), stage name of American soul singer Joseph Arrington Jr. Entertainment * ''Tex'', the Italian ...

vendor Y&Y, extended the Lucida family with a full set of TeX mathematical symbols, making it one of the few typefaces that provide full-featured text and mathematical

typesetting Typesetting is the composition of text by means of arranging physical ''type'' (or ''sort'') in mechanical systems or '' glyphs'' in digital systems representing '' characters'' (letters and other symbols).Dictionary.com Unabridged. Random ...

within TeX. Lucida is still licensed commercially through the TUG store as well through their own web store. The fonts are occasionally updated.

Key features

The Lucida fonts have a large

x-height upright 2.0, alt=A diagram showing the line terms used in typography In typography, the x-height, or corpus size, is the distance between the baseline and the mean line of lowercase letters in a typeface. Typically, this is the height of the let ...

(tall lower-case letters), open apertures and quite widely spaced letters, classic features of fonts designed for legibility in body text. Capital letters were designed to be somewhat narrow and short in order to make all-caps acronyms blend in. Bigelow has said in interview that the characters were designed based on hand-drawn bitmaps to see what parts of letters needed to be clear in bitmap, before creating outlines that would render as clear bitmaps. The fonts include ligatures, but these are not needed for text, allowing use on simplistic typesetting systems. x-heights are consistent between the fonts. Hinting was used to allow onscreen display.

Lucida Arrows

A family of fonts containing arrows.

Lucida Blackletter

A family of cursive

blackletter Blackletter (sometimes black letter), also known as Gothic script, Gothic minuscule, or Textura, was a script used throughout Western Europe from approximately 1150 until the 17th century. It continued to be commonly used for the Danish, Norweg ...

fonts released in 1992.

Lucida Bright

Based on Lucida Serif, it features more contrasted strokes and serifs. The font was first used as the text face for ''

Scientific American ''Scientific American'', informally abbreviated ''SciAm'' or sometimes ''SA'', is an American popular science magazine. Many famous scientists, including Albert Einstein and Nikola Tesla, have contributed articles to it. In print since 1845, it i ...

'' magazine, and its letter-spacing was tightened to give it a slightly closer fit for use in two and three column formats.

Lucida Calligraphy

A script font family, released in 1992 and developed from

Chancery cursive Italic script, also known as chancery cursive and Italic hand, is a semi-cursive, slightly sloped style of handwriting and calligraphy that was developed during the Renaissance in Italy. It is one of the most popular styles used in contemporary ...

. In 2014, Bigelow & Holmes released additional weights in normal and narrow widths.

Lucida Casual

A casual font, released in 1994. Similar to Lucida Handwriting, but without connecting strokes. In 2014, Bigelow & Holmes released additional weights in normal and narrow widths.

Lucida Console

monospaced font A monospaced font, also called a fixed-pitch, fixed-width, or non-proportional font, is a font whose letters and characters each occupy the same amount of horizontal space. This contrasts with variable-width fonts, where the letters and spaci ...

that is a variant of Lucida Sans Typewriter, with smaller line spacing and the addition of the WGL4 character set. In 2014, Bigelow & Holmes released bold weights and italics in normal and narrow widths. Lucida Console was the default font in

Microsoft Notepad Windows Notepad is a simple text editor for Windows; it creates and edits plain text documents. First released in 1983 to commercialize the computer mouse in MS-DOS, Notepad has been part of every version of Windows ever since. History In May ...

from

Windows 2000 Windows 2000 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft and oriented towards businesses. It was the direct successor to Windows NT 4.0, and was released to manufacturing on December 15, 1999, and was officially ...

through

Windows 7 Windows 7 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was Software release life cycle#Release to manufacturing (RTM), released to manufacturing on July 22, 2009, and became generally available on October 22, ...

, its replacement being

Consolas Consolas is a monospaced typeface designed by Luc(as) de Groot. It is a part of the ClearType Font Collection, a suite of fonts that take advantage of Microsoft's ClearType font rendering technology. It has been included with Windows since Window ...

. This was also the font for the blue screen of death from

Windows XP Windows XP is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It was released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct upgrade to its predecessors, Windows 2000 for high-end and ...

Lucida Fax

slab serif In typography, a slab serif (also called ''mechanistic'', ''square serif'', ''antique'' or ''Egyptian'') typeface is a type of serif typeface characterized by thick, block-like serifs. Serif terminals may be either blunt and angular ( Rockwell), ...

font family released in 1992. Derived from Lucida, and specifically designed for telefaxing.

Lucida Handwriting

A font, released in 1992, designed to resemble informal cursive handwriting with modern plastic-tipped or felt-tipped pens or markers. In 2014, Bigelow & Holmes added additional weights and widths to the family.

Lucida Icons

A family of fonts for ornament and decoration uses. It contains ampersands,

interrobang The interrobang (), also known as the interabang (often represented by any of ?!, !?, ?!? or !?!), is an unconventional punctuation mark used in various written languages and intended to combine the functions of the question mark, or interro ...

s, asterisms, circled Lucida Sans numerals, etc.

Lucida Math

A family of fonts for mathematical expressions. Lucida Math Extension contains only mathematical symbols. Lucida Math Italic contains Latin characters from Lucida Serif Italic, but with smaller line spacing, and added Greek letters. Lucida Math contains mathematical symbols, and blackletter (from Lucida Blackletter) and script letters in (from Lucida Calligraphy Italic) Letterlike Symbols region.

Lucida OpenType

First released in March 2012, this collection includes OpenType math fonts in regular and bold weights, and Lucida Bright, Lucida Sans Typewriter, and Lucida Sans text fonts in the usual four variants (regular, italic, bold, bold italic). The regular math font includes an entirely new math script alphabet in

Roundhand Round hand (also roundhand) is a type of handwriting and calligraphy originating in England in the 1660s primarily by the writing masters John Ayres and William Banson. Characterised by an open flowing hand (style) and subtle contrast of thick a ...

style, among other new characters. The Lucida Bright text fonts include

Unicode Latin Over a thousand characters from the Latin script are encoded in the Unicode Standard, grouped in several basic and extended Latin blocks. The extended ranges contain mainly precomposed letters plus diacritics that are equivalently encoded with c ...

character blocks including Basic Latin, Latin-1, and Latin Extended-A characters for American, Western European, Central European, Turkish, and other Latin-based orthographies.

Lucida Sans

A family of

humanist sans-serif In typography and lettering, a sans-serif, sans serif, gothic, or simply sans letterform is one that does not have extending features called "serifs" at the end of strokes. Sans-serif typefaces tend to have less stroke width variation than seri ...

fonts complementing Lucida Serif. The italic is a " true italic" rather than a " sloped roman", inspired by chancery cursive handwriting of the Italian renaissance, which Bigelow and Holmes studied while at

Reed College Reed College is a private liberal arts college in Portland, Oregon. Founded in 1908, Reed is a residential college with a campus in the Eastmoreland neighborhood, with Tudor- Gothic style architecture, and a forested canyon nature preserve at ...

in the 1960s.

Lucida Grande

A version of Lucida Sans with expanded character sets, released around 2000. It supports Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew, Thai scripts. It is most notable for having been used as the system font for

macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lap ...

until version 10.10.

Lucida Sans Typewriter

Also called Lucida Typewriter Sans, this is a sans-serif monospaced font family, designed for typewriters. Its styling is reminiscent of

Letter Gothic Letter Gothic is a monospaced sans-serif typeface. It was created between 1956 and 1962 by Roger Roberson for IBM in their Lexington, Kentucky, plant, and was inspired by the original drawings for Optima. It was initially intended to be used in ...

and Andalé Mono; a variant, Lucida Console , replaced those two fonts on

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for se ...

systems.

Lucida Sans Unicode

Based on Lucida Sans Regular, this version added characters in Arrows, Block Elements, Box Drawing, Combining Diacritical Marks, Control Pictures, Currency Symbols, Cyrillic, General Punctuation, Geometric Shapes, Greek and Coptic, Hebrew, IPA Extensions, Latin Extended-A, Latin Extended-B, Letterlike Symbols, Mathematical Operators, Miscellaneous Symbols, Miscellaneous Technical, Spacing Modifier Letters, Superscripts and Subscripts regions.

Lucida Serif

The original Lucida font designed in 1985, featuring a thickened serif. It was simply called Lucida when it was first released.

Lucida Typewriter Serif

Also called Lucida Typewriter, this font is a slab serif monospaced version of Lucida Fax, but with wider serifs. The letters are wider than Lucida Sans Typewriter.

Usages

Lucida Console is used in various parts of

. From

until

, Lucida Console is used as the default typeface of Notepad. In

until

, and in

Windows CE Windows Embedded Compact, formerly Windows Embedded CE, Windows Powered and Windows CE, is an operating system subfamily developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows Embedded family of products. Unlike Windows Embedded Standard, which is base ...

, Lucida Console is used as the typeface of the Blue Screen of Death. Lucida Grande, as well as Lucida Sans Demibold (identical outlines to Lucida Grande Bold but with tighter spacing of numerals), were used as the primary user interface font in

Apple Inc. Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Apple is the largest technology company by revenue (totaling in 2021) and, as of June 2022, is the world's biggest company b ...

Mac OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. Within the market of ...

operating system until

OS X Yosemite OS X Yosemite ( ; version 10.10) is the eleventh major release of macOS, Apple Inc.'s desktop and server operating system for Macintosh computers. OS X Yosemite was announced and released to developers on June 2, 2014, at WWDC 2014 and rel ...

, as well as many programs including Front Row. Lucida is also used in the logo for

Air Canada Air Canada is the flag carrier and the largest airline of Canada by the size and passengers carried. Air Canada maintains its headquarters in the borough of Saint-Laurent, Montreal, Quebec. The airline, founded in 1937, provides scheduled and ...

. A collection of Lucida variants are included in the Oracle JRE 9. Lucida Calligraphy was used in the logo for Gladden Entertainment. In April 2012, Lucida Sans was selected by GfK Blue Moon as the font for a package design as part of a proposed law in Australia banning logos on cigarette packaging. The proposed law requires cigarettes to be sold in dark olive-brown packages that depict graphic images of the effects of smoking and the cigarette's brand printed in Lucida Sans. According to Tom Delaney, a senior designer with New York design consultant Muts & Joy, "Lucida Sans is one of the least graceful sans-serif typefaces designed. It’s clumsy in its line construction." On August 15, 2012, the Australian government approved the ban on cigarette logos, effectively replacing them with the unattractive packaging.

References

External links

''Lucida'' and TeX
(TeX Users Group)

(Linotype corporation)

by Charles Bigelow
''Lucida'' Family Overview
by Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes
Lucida Calligraphy Text Samples - Thin, Lite, Normal, Bold, UltraBlack

Lucida Handwriting Text Samples - Thin, Lite, Normal, Bold, UltraBlack

Lucida Casual Text Samples - Thin, Lite, Normal, Bold, UltraBlack

Lucida Grande Text Samples - Light, Normal, Bold, Black

Lucida OpenType font set

Lucida Bright Math OT
* Ulrik Vieth and Mojca Miklavec
Another incarnation of Lucida: Towards Lucida OpenType
TUGboat, Volume 32 (2011), No. 2
All Lucida fonts
by Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes
Interview with Charles Bigelow
(Yue Wang) {{Authority control Unified serif and sans-serif typeface families Symbol typefaces TeX Typefaces and fonts introduced in 1984 Mathematical OpenType typefaces Humanist sans-serif typefaces Typefaces designed by Charles Bigelow (type designer) Typefaces designed by Kris Holmes