In digital

typography Typography is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable and appealing when displayed. The arrangement of type involves selecting typefaces, point sizes, line lengths, line-spacing ( leading), ...

, Lucida Sans Unicode

OpenType OpenType is a format for scalable computer fonts. It was built on its predecessor TrueType, retaining TrueType's basic structure and adding many intricate data structures for prescribing typographic behavior. OpenType is a registered trademark ...

font from the design studio of Bigelow & HolmesAll Bigelow & Holmes Lucida typefaces are distributed by the designers throug
The Lucida Fonts Store
and a subset of Lucida fonts is distributed b
Ascender Corporation
acquired b
Monotype Imaging Holdings, Inc.
in December 2010. is designed to support the most commonly used characters defined in version 1.0 of the

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, wh ...

standard. It is a sans-serif variant of the

Lucida Lucida (pronunciation: ) is an extended family of related typefaces 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-resol ...

font family and supports

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

, Cyrillic and

Hebrew Hebrew (; ; ) is a Northwest Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Historically, it is one of the spoken languages of the Israelites and their longest-surviving descendants, the Jews and Samaritans. It was largely preserved ...

scripts, as well as all the letters used in the

International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standardized representation ...

. It is the first Unicode encoded font to include non-Latin scripts (Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew). It was designed by

Kris Holmes Kris Holmes (born 1950, Reedley, California) is an American typeface designer, calligrapher, type design educator and animator. She, with Charles Bigelow, is the co-creator of the Lucida font family, among many other typeface designs. She is Pres ...

and Charles Bigelow in 1993, and was first shipped with the Microsoft

Windows NT 3.1 Windows NT 3.1 is the first major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft, released on July 27, 1993. At the time of Windows NT's release, Microsoft's Windows 3.1 desktop environment had established brand recognition ...

operating system. The font comes pre-installed with all Microsoft Windows versions since

Windows 98 Windows 98 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of Microsoft Windows operating systems. The second operating system in the 9x line, it is the successor to Windows 95, and was released to ...

. A nearly identical font, called ''

Lucida Grande Lucida Grande is a humanist sans-serif typeface. It is a member of the Lucida family of typefaces designed by Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes. It is best known for its implementation throughout the macOS user interface from 1999 to 2014, as ...

'', shipped as the default system font with Apple's

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 computers. Within the market of desktop and la ...

operating system, until switching to

Helvetica Neue Helvetica (originally Neue Haas Grotesk) is a widely used sans-serif typeface developed in 1957 by Swiss typeface designer Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann. Helvetica is a neo-grotesque design, one influenced by the famous 19th century (1890s) ...

in 2014 with

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 ...

, and in addition to the above, also supports Arabic and Thai scripts. Letters in the

, particularly upside down letters, are aligned for easy reading upside down. Thus, the font is among the most ideal for upside-down text, compared to other Unicode typefaces, which have the turned "t" and "h" characters aligned with their tops at the base line and thus appear out of line. A flaw in Lucida Sans Unicode is in the combining low line character (U+0332) and the combining double low line character (U+0333), which are rendered as a blank or as a simple tiny underline when font-size is less than 238 point or so in word processors, whereas combining double low line is rendered a simple low line in web browsers, no matter which font is used. Other well-known Unicode fonts include

Code2000 Code2000 is a serif and pan- Unicode digital font, which includes characters and symbols from a very large range of writing systems. As of the current final version 1.171 released in 2008, Code2000 is designed and implemented by James Kass t ...

Arial Unicode MS In digital typography, the TrueType font Arial Unicode MS is an extended version of the font Arial. Compared to Arial, it includes higher line height, omits kerning pairs and adds enough glyphs to cover a large subset of Unicode 2.1—thus suppo ...

, and the various free software Unicode typeface projects.

References

"The design of a Unicode font"
by Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes. Electronic Publishing, Vol. 6(3), 289-305 (September 1993).

External links

Lucida Fonts Matrix

Microsoft typography: Lucida Sans Unicode

Lucida Sans Unicode
described by Roman Czyborra. Unicode typefaces Windows XP typefaces Typefaces and fonts introduced in 1993 Humanist sans-serif typefaces Typefaces designed by Kris Holmes Typefaces designed by Charles Bigelow (type designer) IPA typefaces {{Typography-stub

See also

References

External links