Lucida Sans Unicode
In digital typography, Lucida Sans Unicode OpenType font from the design studio of Bigelow & Holmes[1] is designed to support the most commonly used characters defined in version 1.0 of the Unicode standard. It is a sans-serif variant of the Lucida font family and supports Latin, Greek, Cyrillic and Hebrew scripts, as well as all the letters used in the International Phonetic Alphabet.
It is the first Unicode encoded font. It was developed by Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes in 1993, and was first shipped with the Microsoft Windows NT 3.1 operating system.
The font comes pre-installed with all Microsoft Windows versions since Windows 98. A nearly identical font, called Lucida Grande, ships as the default system font with Apple's Mac OS X operating system, and in addition to the above, also supports Arabic and Thai scripts.
Letters in the International Phonetic Alphabet, particularly upside down letters, are aligned for easy reading upside down. Thus, the font is among the most ideal for upside-down text, compared to other Unicode typefaces, which have the turned "t" and "h" characters aligned with their tops at the base line and thus appear out of line.
A flaw in Lucida Sans Unicode is in the combining low line character, which is rendered as a blank.
Other well-known Unicode fonts include Code2000, Arial Unicode MS, and the various free software Unicode typeface projects.
See also
- List of typefaces
- Unicode typeface
References
- ↑ Bigelow & Holmes typefaces are distributed by Ascender Corporation, which was acquired by Monotype Imaging Holdings, Inc. in December 2010.
- "The design of a Unicode font", by Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes. Electronic Publishing, Vol. 6(3), 289-305 (September 1993).
External links
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