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’s best known for its implementation throughout the macOSuser interface from 1999 to 2014, as well as in other Apple software like Safari for Windows. As of OS X Yosemite, the system font was changed from Lucida Grande to Helvetica Neue. In OS X El Capitan the system font changed again, this time to San Francisco. The typefacelooks 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 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. Lucida Grande fonts directly from Bigelow & Holmes contain the pan-European WGL character set.
Scripts and Unicode ranges
Lucida Grande contains 2,826 Unicode-encoded glyphs in version 5.0d8e1. Language support by version:
3.7d8
5.0d8e1 revision 1.002
6.0d10e1 revision 6.004
6.1d4e1
Afrikaans
Albanian
Azerbaijani
Basque
Belarusian
Bulgarian
Catalan
Cornish
Croatian
Czech
Danish
Dutch
English
Esperanto
Estonian
Faroese
Finnish
French
Galician
German
Greek
Hausa
Hawaiian
Hebrew
Hungarian
Icelandic
Indonesian
Irish
Italian
Kalaallisut
Kazakh
Latvian
Lithuanian
Macedonian
Malay
Maltese
Manx
Norwegian Bokmål
Norwegian Nynorsk
Oromo
Polish
Portuguese
Romanian
Russian
Serbian
Slovak
Slovenian
Somali
Spanish
Swahili
Swedish
Thai
Turkish
Ukrainian
Uzbek
Vietnamese
Welsh
Similarity to Lucida Sans/Lucida Sans Unicode
Almost all glyphs in Lucida Grande look identical to their matching counterparts in Lucida Sans as well as Lucida Sans Unicode, with the very few exceptions of:
The digit "sans-serif;">1" with a serif on the baseline;
The hyphen "-" that is longer, roughly of an en-dash width;
The commercial at "@" with a larger and more upright letter and circle.
These slightly different characters look clearer in small font sizes in display and user interface uses. Note: If you have installed Lucida Grande font on Windows or Linux you will see followings above.
Uses
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 in professional-grade desktop publishing. The Getty-DubayItalic Handwriting Series of penmanship workbooks in particular is typeset primarily in a specially modified version of Lucida Sans, as its monoline italic bears a close resemblance to the form of writing that the program teaches.
