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 is best known for its implementation throughout the macOS user interface from 1999 to 2014, as well as in other Apple software like Safari for Windows. As of OS X Yosemite (version 10.10), the system font was changed from Lucida Grande to Helvetica Neue.[1] In OS X El Capitan (version 10.11) the system font changed again, this time to San Francisco.[2]

Lucida Grande
CategorySans-serif
ClassificationHumanist
Designer(s)Charles Bigelow
Kris Holmes
FoundryBigelow & Holmes
Date releasedNovember 16, 1999

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.

Scripts and Unicode ranges

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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/Lucida Sans Unicode

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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:

These slightly different characters look clearer in small font sizes in display and user interface (especially graphical and web-based) uses.

Note: If you have installed Lucida Grande font on Windows or Linux you will see followings above.

Uses

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Apart from macOS releases prior to OS X Yosemite, many websites and blogs use Lucida Grande as the default typeface for body text, for example Facebook and many phpBB forums. Since this typeface is usually absent from most other operating systems like Windows and Linux, the CSS style sheets of these websites often include the fonts (usually Sans-serif: Tahoma, Verdana, Trebuchet MS, Segoe UI, Calibri, DejaVu Sans, Arial, Open Sans, or even Lucida Sans Unicode, in case Lucida Grande is unavailable for rendering. After the introduction of OS X Yosemite where Lucida Grande is no longer used as the default system font, several developers have created utilities to bring Lucida Grande back as the default system font.[6]

Although it was designed primarily as a screen font, Lucida Grande/Sans also appears frequently in print, due at least in part to the ubiquity of Mac platform (and thus the typeface) in professional-grade desktop publishing. The Getty-Dubay Italic Handwriting Series of penmanship workbooks in particular is typeset primarily in a specially modified version of Lucida Sans (with a cursive lowercase "y"), as its monoline italic bears a close resemblance to the form of writing that the program teaches.

See also

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References

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  1. ^ "Apple changes OS X system font for the first time in Yosemite". 2 June 2014.
  2. ^ "Fonts". Apple Developer. Apple Inc. Retrieved 13 June 2015.
  3. ^ A Brief History of Lucida Grande
  4. ^ "Mac OS X 10.4:Fonts list". Apple Computers. 6 November 2011. Retrieved 10 January 2012.
  5. ^ "Mac OS X 10.5:Fonts list". Apple Computers. 7 November 2011. Retrieved 10 January 2012.
  6. ^ i, Mac &. "OS X 10.10: Hack stellt alte Schriftart wieder her". Mac & i (in German). Retrieved 7 September 2016.
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