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Category | Sans-serif, serif, and more |
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Designer(s) | Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes |
Date released | 1984 |
License | commercial |
Lucida (pronunciation: /ˈluːsɪdə/[1]) is an extended family of related typefaces designed by Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes and released from 1984 onwards.[2][3] The family is intended to be extremely legible when printed at small size or displayed on a low-resolution display – hence the name, from 'lucid' (clear or easy to understand).[4]
There are many variants of Lucida, including serif (Fax, Bright), sans-serif (Sans, Sans Unicode, Grande, Sans Typewriter) and scripts (Blackletter, Calligraphy, Handwriting). Many are released with other software, most notably Microsoft Office.
Bigelow and Holmes, together with the (now defunct) TeX vendor Y&Y, extended the Lucida family with a full set of TeX mathematical symbols, making it one of the few typefaces that provide full-featured text and mathematical typesetting within TeX. Lucida is still licensed commercially through the TUG store[5] as well through their own web store.[6] The fonts are occasionally updated.