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-resolution display – hence the name, from 'lucid' (clear or easy to understand).

There are many variants of Lucida, including serif (Fax, Bright), sans-serif (Sans, Sans Unicode, Grande, Sans Typewriter) and scripts (Blackletter, Calligraphy, Handwriting). Many are released with other software, most notably Microsoft Office.

Bigelow and Holmes, together with the (now defunct) TeX 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 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 (tall lower-case letters), open apertures and quite widely spaced letters, classic features of fonts designed for legibility in body text.

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 Handwriting

thumb|left|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, interrobangs, 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 (from Lucida Calligraphy Italic) in the 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 style, among other new characters. The Lucida Bright text fonts include Unicode Latin character blocks including Basic Latin, Latin-1, and Latin Extended-A characters for American, Western European, Central European, Turkish, and other Latin-based orthographies.

Usages

Lucida Console is used in various parts of Microsoft Windows. From Windows 2000 until Windows 7, Lucida Console is used as the default typeface of Notepad. 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.

See also

  • MathTime
  • Wingdings

References

  • Lucida and TeX (TeX Users Group)
  • Lucida Font Family Group - by Kris Holmes, Charles Bigelow (Linotype corporation)
  • Notes on Lucida, 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)