Lucida Sans Unicode

A sample of Lucida Sans Unicode

A sample of 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 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. A nearly identical font, called Lucida Grande, ships as the default system font with Apple's Mac OS X operating system, until switching to Helvetica Neue in 2014 with OS X Yosemite, 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 (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, whereas combining double low line is rendered a simple low line in web browsers, no matter which font is used.

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

• "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.

Microsoft Windows typefaces
Latin, Greek, Cyrillic	Arial, Arial Rounded Arial Unicode MS Bauhaus 93 Broadway Book Antiqua Calibri Calisto MT Cambria Candara Century Gothic Comic Sans MS Consolas Constantia Cooper Black Copperplate Gothic Corbel Courier New Franklin Gothic Medium Gabriola Georgia Goudy Stout Harlow Solid Italic Impact Lucida Lucida Sans Unicode Microsoft Sans Serif News Gothic MT OCR A Extended Palatino Linotype Segoe Tahoma Times New Roman Trebuchet MS Verdana Westminster Wide Latin
Hebrew	Aharoni Arial Courier New Lucida Sans Unicode Microsoft Sans Serif Segoe UI Mono Tahoma Times New Roman
Arabic	Arial Courier New Microsoft Sans Serif Segoe UI Tahoma Times New Roman
Thai	Microsoft Sans Serif Segoe UI Mono Tahoma
Chinese	Simplified Microsoft YaHei SimHei SimSun Traditional Microsoft JhengHei MingLiU
Korean	Batang Dotum Gulim Malgun Gothic (no Hanja before Windows 8)
Japanese	Meiryo MS Gothic MS Mincho
Indic scripts	Gautami Nirmala UI Vrinda
Other	Cambria Math Ebrima Euphemia Gadugi Marlett Nyala Sylfaen Symbol Webdings Wingdings
List of typefaces included with Microsoft Windows