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LucidaSans
Participant
July 3, 2013
Question

Lucida Sans problems on screen

  • July 3, 2013
  • 1 reply
  • 8570 views

My company has been working with Lucida Sans for print and screen text, and lately I have been fielding complaints about what is perceived as a patchy, low-res look of the typeface as it appears on screen (apps, email etc). It performs well in print, however.

I asked a type designer, and he told me that Lucida Sans was originally designed for low-res screens, and on today's high-resolution screens maintains an appearance that has not aged well with the times. He also said that Microsoft has largely abandoned Lucida Sans as a font it supports.

Can anybody affirm this problem? Is there a version of Lucida Sans that has been "modernized", smoothed out so that it takes on a better appearance on screen/the web?

We are looking at alternate plan B solutions such as Segoe, Myriad, Calibri and Verdana. We would like to avoid this as we have set many templates in Lucida Sans as is and it will be a pain to change them all.

    This topic has been closed for replies.

    1 reply

    Dov Isaacs
    Dov Isaacs
    Legend
    July 3, 2013

    The Lucida and Lucida Sans family of typefaces were designed back in 1985 by Charles Bigelow and Chris Holmes. The design of these typefaces was done to specifically address the issues of renderability and readability with the 240 to 300dpi laser printers of the day, not necessarily for screen reading. Note that at that time, especially given the very low resolution of computer CRT screens and lack of processor speed and memory, screen display was normally done with hand-tuned bitmap fonts; on-the-fly screen rendering was not feasible. In terms of yielding well-rendered text on low resolution laser printers, Lucida and Lucida Sans was fairly successful. In 1985 when I was working for Imagen, an early laser printer vendor, we very successfully bundled Lucida and Lucida Sans with our 240 and 300dpi products.

    However, times change, technology changes, and tastes change. What was loved and leading edge 28 years ago may not be that well regarded today.

    There is something inconsistent in your description, though! Given that you find Lucida Sans performing well for print (assuming 600 or 1200dpi) and conceivably OK for low resolution screens, it makes little technical sense that it wouldn't perform better on higher resolution screens than on lower resolution screens. That brings up a few possibilities:

    (1)     The rendering of Lucida Sans on a higher resolution screen actually may be a more accurate rendering of the font given the extra pixels available for such rendering, you actually can see it better and more than you might when perusing paper, and in fact you really don't like the design. That's OK! It's perfectly fine to be subjective about fonts. Otherwise we would only have one serif and one sans serif font!

    (2)     There are multiple versions of Lucida Sans available. The version that ships with Windows is a TrueType version dating back at latest to 1999 (based on the time stamp on the font file). Adobe shipped a Type 1 version of the font many years ago and then reissued the font as an OpenType CFF font (OpenType format with Type 1 font outlines) with its last major revision in 2002. Maybe you would like the screen rendering of the OpenType CFF version of Lucida Sans better, maybe not.

    In terms of changing to another font family, yes it will be a major pain in the tuchas, if you need to go to such a “plan B” I certainly would not limit myself to Microsoft's system fonts. The amount of work you will need to do will not be any less by choosing one of them. You need to consider the aesthetics as well as how compatible the new font family will be in terms of how your documents flow, whether for long documents you will need fewer or more pages, etc.

              - Dov

    - Dov Isaacs, former Adobe Principal Scientist (April 30, 1990 - May 30, 2021)
    L
    LucidaSansAuthor
    Participant
    July 4, 2013

    Thanks for your response. A link that was suggested to me does seem to back

    up what I felt is going on here:

    http://www.brownbatterystudios.com/sixthings/2007/03/14/lucida-hybrid-the-gr

    ande-alternative/

    <http://www.brownbatterystudios.com/sixthings/2007/03/14/lucida-hybrid-the-g

    rande-alternative/>

    The author of the article complains that Lucida Sans looks “hideous” at

    normal weight (his screen capture of the problem mirrors what we see at my

    company with Lucida Sans on screen), and compares it unfavourably to Lucida

    Unicode, which he says also has some problems but is a better alternative.

    He recommends using Lucida Sans Unicode with Lucida Sans italics in a web

    environment (though our concerns about the on-screen appearance of Lucida

    Sans go beyond just use for the web).

    This is unfortunate; a comment under the article says: “Lucida as a

    viable font face for website is garbage. Any visual impact you might get by

    choosing the font is completely offset by the amount of jiggery-pokery you

    have to do to get it to work properly…more mainstream fonts like Arial,

    Verdana etc at least work consistently every time, and produce readable

    text.”

    My understanding is that Lucida Grande is only appropriate for Mac screens,

    so I’m guessing that’s not an option?

    Neal Halverson

    Corporate Identity Specialist - Canada

    Armstrong Fluid Technology

    Dov Isaacs
    Dov Isaacs
    Legend
    July 4, 2013

    There is a major difference between choosing a font that will be displayed on-screen via a PDF file versus one displayed on-screen as part of a web page.

    In terms of PDF, depending upon a font's end-user license agreement, you may embed the font in the PDF file itself and when the PDF is either printed or rendered on screen, that embedded font is what is used. Thus, if Lucida Grande allows for embedding in a PDF file, then there is no problem in terms of viewing that PDF file on a Windows system versus a Mac system.

    The problem with web pages is that is all you are doing is requesting a particular font, then you are at the mercy of the web browser and the host system to find and use that font, if it has it. Lucida Grande is not a system font under Windows; it is currently a MacOS system font. Note that I say currently since no OS vendor guarantees that any particular system font will always be provided.

    Thus, in general, using simple HTML you can't rely on any one particular font to always be available.

    If you really must have a particular font used on a web page, there are various web font mechanisms where you specifically license a font and the mechanism to work with your web page and browser to download and make that font available temporarily for display of the page in question. This does have a limitation in that this mechanism doesn't work for all browsers and versions of same. As an example, these Adobe forums are formatted with a font Adobe Clean, a typeface family that Adobe doesn't license to the public and is not resident on any non-Adobe employee's system. Yet, this page is displayed with that font.

    You should take a look at <http://www.adobe.com/products/webfont.html> for some more information about this topic.

              - Dov

    - Dov Isaacs, former Adobe Principal Scientist (April 30, 1990 - May 30, 2021)
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