Lucida Grande
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| Category | Sans-serif |
|---|---|
| Classification | Humanist |
| Designer(s) | Charles Bigelow Kris Holmes |
| Foundry | Bigelow & Holmes |
| Date released | 2000 |
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 has been used throughout Mac OS X user interface from 1999 to 2014, as well as in Safari for Windows up to the browser's version 3.2.3 released on 12 May 2009. As of OS X 10.10 Yosemite, the system font was changed from Lucida Grande to Helvetica Neue.[1] In OS X El Capitan the system font changed again. This time to San Francisco (2014 typeface).[2]
The typeface looks very similar to Lucida Sans and Lucida Sans Unicode. Like Sans Unicode, Grande supports the most commonly used characters defined in version 2.0 of the Unicode standard.
Three weights 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.[3]
Lucida Grande fonts directly from Bigelow & Holmes contain the pan-European WGL character set.
Contents
Scripts and Unicode ranges
Lucida Grande contains 2,826 Unicode-encoded glyphs (2,245 characters) in version 5.0d8e1 (Revision 1.002).
Language support by version:
| 3.7d8 | 5.0d8e1 revision 1.002[4] | 6.0d10e1 revision 6.004 (OSX 10.5)[5] | 6.1d4e1 (OSX 10.6) | |
| Afrikaans | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Albanian | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Azerbaijani | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Basque | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Belarusian | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Bulgarian | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Catalan | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Cornish | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Croatian | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Czech | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Danish | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Dutch | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| English | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Esperanto | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Estonian | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Faroese | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Finnish | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| French | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Galician | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| German | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Greek | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Hausa | No | Yes | Yes | No |
| Hawaiian | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Hebrew | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Hungarian | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Icelandic | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Indonesian | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Irish | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Italian | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Kalaallisut | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Kazakh | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Latvian | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Lithuanian | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Macedonian | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Malay | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Maltese | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Manx | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Norwegian Bokmål | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Norwegian Nynorsk | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Oromo | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Polish | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Portuguese | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Romanian | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Russian | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Serbian | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Slovak | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Slovenian | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Somali | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Spanish | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Swahili | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Swedish | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Thai | No | Yes | Yes | No |
| Turkish | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Ukrainian | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Uzbek | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Vietnamese | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Welsh | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Similarity to Lucida Sans
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 on the baseline;
- The hyphen "-" that is longer, roughly of an en-dash width;
- The at sign "@" with a larger and more upright letter and circle.
These slightly different characters look clearer in small font sizes in display and user interface (especially graphical and web-based) uses.
Uses
Apart from Mac OS X, many websites and blogs use Lucida Grande as the default typeface for body text, for example Facebook and many phpBB message boards. Since this typeface is usually absent from other operating systems like Windows and Linux, the style sheets of these websites often include Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, or even Lucida Sans Unicode in case Lucida Grande is not available for rendering.
See also
References
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Wikimedia Commons has media related to Lucida Grande. |
- ↑ http://www.theverge.com/2014/6/2/5773838/apple-os-x-yosemite-changes-system-font-for-first-time
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ A Brief History of Lucida Grande
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
