Lucida Grande is a humanist sans-serif

typeface A typeface (or font family) is a design of Letter (alphabet), letters, Numerical digit, numbers and other symbols, to be used in printing or for electronic display. Most typefaces include variations in size (e.g., 24 point), weight (e.g., light, ...

. 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 macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

user interface from 1999 to 2014, as well as in other Apple software like

Safari A safari (; originally ) is an overland journey to observe wildlife, wild animals, especially in East Africa. The so-called big five game, "Big Five" game animals of Africa – lion, African leopard, leopard, rhinoceros, African elephant, elep ...

for

Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

. As of

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 re ...

(version 10.10), the system font was changed from Lucida Grande to Helvetica Neue. In

OS X El Capitan OS X El Capitan ( ) () is the twelfth major release of macOS (named OS X at the time of El Capitan's release), Apple Inc.'s desktop and server operating system for Macintosh. It focuses mainly on performance, stability, and security. Followi ...

(version 10.11) the system font changed again, this time to

San Francisco San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...

. The typeface looks very similar to Lucida Sans and

Lucida Sans Unicode Lucida Sans Unicode is an OpenType typeface from the design studio of Bigelow & Holmes,All Bigelow & Holmes Lucida typefaces are distributed by the designers througThe Lucida Fonts Storeand a subset of Lucida fonts is distributed bAscender Corpo ...

. Like Sans Unicode, Grande supports the most commonly used characters defined in version 2.0 of the

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

standard. Three

weight In science and engineering, the weight of an object is a quantity associated with the gravitational force exerted on the object by other objects in its environment, although there is some variation and debate as to the exact definition. Some sta ...

s of Lucida Grande: Normal, Bold, and Black, in three styles: Roman, Italic, and Oblique, were developed by Bigelow & Holmes. Apple released the Regular (Normal Roman) and Bold Roman with OS X. In June, 2014, Bigelow & Holmes released four weights: Light, Normal, Bold, and Black, in three styles: Roman, Italic, and Oblique. B&H also released Narrow versions of those twelve weight/styles, plus four Lucida Grande Monospaced fonts in Regular, Bold, Italic, and Bold Italic styles, with narrow versions of the four monospaced weight/styles. Lucida Grande fonts directly from Bigelow & Holmes contain the pan-European WGL character set.

Scripts and Unicode ranges

Lucida Grande contains 2,826 Unicode-encoded

glyph A glyph ( ) is any kind of purposeful mark. In typography, a glyph is "the specific shape, design, or representation of a character". It is a particular graphical representation, in a particular typeface, of an element of written language. A ...

s (2,245 characters) in version 5.0d8e1 (Revision 1.002). Language support by version:

Similarity to Lucida Sans/Lucida Sans Unicode

Almost all glyphs in Lucida Grande (and Lucida Grande Bold) look identical to their matching counterparts in Lucida Sans (and Lucida Sans Demibold) as well as Lucida Sans Unicode, with the very few exceptions of: * The digit "1" with a

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 ( ...

on the baseline; * The

hyphen The hyphen is a punctuation mark used to join words and to separate syllables of a single word. The use of hyphens is called hyphenation. The hyphen is sometimes confused with dashes (en dash , em dash and others), which are wider, or with t ...

"-" that is longer, roughly of an en-dash width; * The commercial at "@" with a larger and more upright letter and circle. These slightly different characters look clearer in small font sizes in display and

user interface In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine fro ...

(especially graphical and web-based) uses. Note: If you have installed Lucida Grande font on

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

you will see followings above.

Uses

Apart from

releases prior to

, many

website A website (also written as a web site) is any web page whose content is identified by a common domain name and is published on at least one web server. Websites are typically dedicated to a particular topic or purpose, such as news, educatio ...

s and

blog A blog (a Clipping (morphology), truncation of "weblog") is an informational website consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries also known as posts. Posts are typically displayed in Reverse chronology, reverse chronologic ...

s use Lucida Grande as the default typeface for body text, for example

Facebook Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...

and many

phpBB phpBB is an Internet forum package written in the PHP scripting language. The name "phpBB" is an abbreviation of ''PHP Bulletin Board''. Available under the GNU General Public License, phpBB is Free and open-source software, free and open-sourc ...

forums. Since this typeface is usually absent from most other operating systems like Windows and

, the CSS style sheets of these websites often include the fonts (usually

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 ...

: Tahoma, Verdana,

Trebuchet MS Trebuchet MS is a Sans-serif#Humanist, humanist sans-serif typeface that Vincent Connare designed for Microsoft, Microsoft Corporation in 1996. Trebuchet MS was the font used for the window titles in the Luna (theme), Windows XP default theme, su ...

, Segoe UI,

Calibri Calibri () is a digital sans-serif typeface family in the humanist or modern style. It was designed by Luc(as) de Groot in 2002–2004 and released to the general public in 2006, with Windows Vista. In Microsoft Office 2007, it replaced Time ...

, DejaVu Sans,

Arial Arial is a sans-serif typeface in the Sans-serif#Neo-grotesque, neo-grotesque style. Fonts from the Arial family are included with all versions of Microsoft Windows after Windows 3.1, as well as in other Microsoft programs, Apple's macOS, and ma ...

, Open Sans, or even

, in case Lucida Grande is unavailable for rendering. After the introduction of OS X Yosemite where Lucida Grande is no longer used as the default system font, several developers have created utilities to bring Lucida Grande back as the default system font. Although it was designed primarily as a screen font, Lucida Grande/Sans also appears frequently in print, due at least in part to the ubiquity of Mac platform (and thus the typeface) in professional-grade desktop publishing. The Getty-Dubay ''Italic Handwriting Series'' of

penmanship Penmanship is the technique of writing with the hand using a writing instrument. Today, this is most commonly done with a pen, or pencil, but throughout history has included many different writing implement, implements. The various generic a ...

workbooks in particular is typeset primarily in a specially modified version of Lucida Sans (with a cursive lowercase "y"), as its monoline italic bears a close resemblance to the form of writing that the program teaches.

References

External links

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

Lucida Grande Mono Text Samples – Normal, Bold
{{OS X typefaces Humanist sans-serif typefaces Unicode typefaces Apple Inc. typefaces Typefaces designed by Charles Bigelow (type designer) Typefaces designed by Kris Holmes

Scripts and Unicode ranges

Similarity to Lucida Sans/Lucida Sans Unicode

Uses

See also

References

External links