Lucida Grande
 | |
| Category | Sans-serif |
|---|---|
| Classification | Humanist |
| Designer(s) |
Charles Bigelow Kris Holmes |
| Foundry | Bigelow & Holmes |
| Variations | Lucida Sans, Lucida Sans Unicode |
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 since 1999, as well as in Safari for Windows up to the browser's version 3.2.3 released on 12 May 2009.
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.
The two weights of this typeface are Regular and Bold, both included in Mac OS X and Safari. There are no italics for this typeface.
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[1] | 6.0d10e1 revision 6.004 (OSX 10.5)[2] | 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
- Lucida Sans Unicode
- List of fonts in Mac OS X
- Myriad (typeface)
- List of typefaces
- Unicode fonts
- Calibri
- Segoe UI
References
- ↑ "Mac OS X 10.4:Fonts list". Apple Computers. 6 November 2011. Retrieved 10 January 2012.
- ↑ "Mac OS X 10.5:Fonts list". Apple Computers. 7 November 2011. Retrieved 10 January 2012.