Семейство шрифтов Lucida: история и разновидности

the Lucida font family
Typeface family designed by Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes in 1984

Lucida (pronunciation: '/l//uː//s//ɪ//d//ə/) is an extended family of related typefaces designed by Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes and released from 1984 onwards. 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). 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 as well through their own web store. The fonts are occasionally updated.

The Lucida fonts have a large x height (tall lower case letters), open apertures and quite widely spaced letters, classic features of fonts designed for legibility in body text.

A casual font, released in 1994. Similar to Lucida Handwriting, but without connecting strokes. In 2014, Bigelow & Holmes released additional weights in normal and narrow widths.

A monospaced font that is a variant of Lucida Sans Typewriter, with smaller line spacing and the addition of the WGL4 character set. In 2014, Bigelow & Holmes released bold weights and italics in normal and narrow widths. Lucida Console was the default font in Microsoft Notepad from Windows 2000 through Windows 7, its replacement being Consolas.

A family of fonts for mathematical expressions. Lucida Math Extension contains only mathematical symbols. Lucida Math Italic contains Latin characters from Lucida Serif Italic, but with smaller line spacing, and added Greek letters. Lucida Math contains mathematical symbols, and blackletter (from Lucida Blackletter) and script letters in (from Lucida Calligraphy Italic) Letterlike Symbols region.

First released in March 2012, this collection includes OpenType math fonts in regular and bold weights, and Lucida Bright, Lucida Sans Typewriter, and Lucida Sans text fonts in the usual four variants (regular, italic, bold, bold italic). The regular math font includes an entirely new math script alphabet in Roundhand style, among other new characters. The Lucida Bright text fonts include Unicode Latin character blocks including Basic Latin, Latin 1, and Latin Extended A characters for American, Western European, Central European, Turkish, and other Latin based orthographies.

A family of humanist sans serif fonts complementing Lucida Serif. The italic is a "true italic" rather than a "sloped roman", inspired by chancery cursive handwriting of the Italian renaissance, which Bigelow and Holmes studied while at Reed College in the 1960s. Lucida Calligraphy was used in the logo for Gladden Entertainment. In April 2012, Lucida Sans was selected by GfK Blue Moon as the font for a package design as part of a proposed law in Australia banning logos on cigarette packaging. The proposed law requires cigarettes to be sold in dark olive brown packages that depict graphic images of the effects of smoking and the cigarette's brand printed in Lucida Sans. According to Tom Delaney, a senior designer with New York design consultant Muts & Joy, "Lucida Sans is one of the least graceful sans serif typefaces designed. It’s clumsy in its line construction." On August 15, 2012, the Australian government approved the ban on cigarette logos, effectively replacing them with the unattractive packaging.