Lucida Grande

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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

References

  1. "Mac OS X 10.4:Fonts list". Apple Computers. 6 November 2011. Retrieved 10 January 2012. 
  2. "Mac OS X 10.5:Fonts list". Apple Computers. 7 November 2011. Retrieved 10 January 2012. 
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