Comments on: Typography of the Web: Lucida Grande/Lucida Sans Unicode

By: Pairing typefaces in book design | David Airey, graphic designer

Pairing typefaces in book design | David Airey, graphic designer — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 11:21:52 +0000

[...] Other Oldstyle Serifs such as Jenson, Bembo, Caslon, Garamond, Palatino, and Sabon, combine well with other Humanist Sans Serifs such as Eras, Gill Sans, and Lucida Grande. [...]

By: Andy

Andy — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 03:03:49 +0000

@Steen – Check Lucida Sans Unicode. Its got lots of silly stuff.

By: Steen

Steen — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 13:39:53 +0000

Where can I find a symbol for the old weight pfund it looks like a u where the last downstroke continues upwards and across towards the left?

By: Andy

Andy — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 23:07:21 +0000

Thanks for the insight Richard, much appreciated.

By: Richard Rutter

Richard Rutter — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 20:35:05 +0000

Just to tie together what Andy and Paul have been commenting, neither Lucida Grande nor Lucida Sans Unicode come with proper italics so when they are viewed in a browser the ‘italic’ is just a mechanically obliqued roman.

However Lucida Sans does (normally) ship with a proper italic. Lucida Sans comes preinstalled with Windows XP SP2, Vista, Office 2007 and Office 2004/Mac. See http://media.24ways.org/2007/17/fontmatrix.html

By: Paul McL

Paul McL — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 23:42:32 +0000

I’m hesitating to wonder whether we aren’t seeing the same italic font, Andy, and one man’s calligraphy is another man’s bending-sideways-writing. :-)

By: Andy

Andy — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 16:30:04 +0000

The font could have been bundled with any software on your computer, but to the best of my knowledge it is not bundled with the OS. Lucida Sans and Lucida Sans Unicode should be almost completely identical, the unicode version just contains all of the various alphabets and symbols.

Even though I do not have an italic version of Lucida on my computer, my browsers are still rendering italics normally, not the calligraphic style you are talking about though.

I will update the article, thanks for the heads up.

By: Paul McL

Paul McL — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 04:41:26 +0000

Andy,

Hmmm… I have it on all my Windows machines. I’m not sure if that’s a function of XP and Vista, or whether it’s MS Office 2003.

So, I have both Lucida Sans and Lucida Sans Unicode (and also Lucida Sans Typewriter).

By: Andy

Andy — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 16:12:03 +0000

Paul, While this may be the case, plain Lucida Sans does not come preloaded on any version of Windows I am aware of. Check out this list of fonts bundled with Windows for more info. Thanks for the info!

By: Paul McL

Paul McL — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 06:37:41 +0000

But if you use Lucida Sans, instead of Lucida Sans Unicode, for Italic styling, you get a very attractive typeface that is very close to calligraphy.

Facebook use Tahoma for their non-Italic sans-serif text (in Windows browsers), but use Lucida Sans Italic for all their italic sans-serif text. It’s a great combination.