Lucida Sans Unicode is an OpenType

typeface A typeface (or font family) is a design of Letter (alphabet), letters, Numerical digit, numbers and other symbols, to be used in printing or for electronic display. Most typefaces include variations in size (e.g., 24 point), weight (e.g., light, ...

from the design studio of Bigelow & Holmes,All Bigelow & Holmes Lucida typefaces are distributed by the designers throug
The Lucida Fonts Store
and a subset of Lucida fonts is distributed b
Ascender Corporation
acquired b
Monotype Imaging Holdings, Inc.
in December 2010. designed to support the most commonly used characters defined in version 1.0 of the

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

standard. It is a

sans-serif In typography and lettering, a sans-serif, sans serif (), gothic, or simply sans letterform is one that does not have extending features called "serifs" at the end of strokes. Sans-serif typefaces tend to have less stroke width variation than ...

variant of the Lucida font family and supports

Latin Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area aroun ...

, Greek,

Cyrillic The Cyrillic script ( ) is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking countries in Southeastern Europe, Ea ...

and

Hebrew Hebrew (; ''ʿÎbrit'') is a Northwest Semitic languages, Northwest Semitic language within the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family. A regional dialect of the Canaanite languages, it was natively spoken by the Israelites and ...

scripts, as well as all the characters used in the

International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standard written representation ...

. It is the first Unicode encoded font to include non-Latin scripts (Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew). It was designed by Kris Holmes and Charles Bigelow 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 Windows 98 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of Microsoft Windows operating systems. It was the second operating system in the 9x line, as the successor to Windows 95. It was Software ...

. A nearly identical font, called Lucida Grande, shipped as the default system font with Apple's

Mac OS X macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

operating system, until switching to Helvetica Neue in 2014 with OS X Yosemite; Lucida Grande added support for Arabic and Thai scripts. Letters in the

, 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. The typeface has a flaw in the combining low line character (U+0332) and the combining double low line character (U+0333), which are rendered as a blank or as a simple tiny underline when font-size is less than 238 point or so in word processors. Other well-known Unicode fonts include Code2000, Arial Unicode MS, and the various Free software Unicode typefaces.

References

"The design of a Unicode font"
by Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes. Electronic Publishing, Vol. 6(3), 289-305 (September 1993).

External links

Lucida Fonts Matrix

Microsoft typography: Lucida Sans Unicode

Lucida Sans Unicode
described by Roman Czyborra. Unicode typefaces Windows XP typefaces Typefaces and fonts introduced in 1993 Humanist sans-serif typefaces Typefaces designed by Kris Holmes Typefaces designed by Charles Bigelow (type designer) IPA typefaces {{Typography-stub

See also

References

External links