Lucida Sans Unicode

In digital typography, "Bigelow & Holmes Inc.'s" Lucida Sans Unicode OpenType font is designed to support the most commonly used characters defined in version 2.0 of the Unicode standard. It is a Sans 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. It was developed by Charles Bigelow & Kris Holmes in 1993 (first, Shipped with Windows NT 3.1).

The font comes preinstalled with all Microsoft Windows versions since Windows 98. A nearly identical font called "Lucida Grande" ships as the default system font on Mac OS X, 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.

Other well-known Unicode fonts include Code2000, Arial Unicode MS, and the Free software Unicode fonts.

ee also

* List of typefaces
* Unicode typefaces

References

* [http://cajun.cs.nott.ac.uk/wiley/journals/epobetan/pdf/volume6/issue3/bigelow.pdf "The design of a Unicode font"] , by Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes. Electronic Publishing, Vol. 6(3), 289-305 (September 1993).