[lucida] lucida fonts and macOS Big Sur Beta

[Bruno Voisin]

> On 21 Aug 2020, at 20:12, Michel Mouric <michel.mouric at wanadoo.fr> wrote:
> 
> I notice that with macOS Big Sur Beta (beta 1 and beta 2 build 20A5354i) the Lucida Console DK  and Lucida Grande DK fonts are no more seen as fixed fonts by the Apple Fonts Book app. They do not appear when the fixed fonts item is clicked in the pop up window of the Font Book app.
> 
> They were seen as fixed fonts by Apple Fonts Book app with macOS Catalina.
> 
> macOS Big Sur Fonts Book app works well with fixed fonts such as Menlo, Consolas, CMU Typewriter...

I can confirm this (same version of Big Sur Public Beta). I do not have access to an earlier setup today, to check whether the problem was indeed absent, but I might tomorrow (a 2010 MacBook Pro with High Sierra or Catalina, I don't remember exactly).

I had never paid attention to these pre-established categories (English, Fixed Width, Fun, Modern, PDF, Traditional and Web) in Font Book.

Looking closely, Fixed Width is a Smart Collection. Such collections are defined by choosing a value for one or several of

	Family name
	Style name
	PostScript name
	Kind
	Languages
	Design style

Specifically, the Fixed Width collection is defined by

	"Design Style" is "Monospaced"

On my setup, Latin Modern Mono and TeX Gyre Cursor are automatically added to this collection, but neither Lucida Grande Mono DK nor Lucida Sans Typewriter OT.

I've tried to find trace of some Design Style metadata in the fonts using FontForge, but found nothing. There is no indication of a Design Style when looking for font info in Font Book (including for Latin Modern Mono and TeX Gyre Cursor). I contemplated installing either

- Apple's Font Tools suite from <https://developer.apple.com/download/more/?=font>

- or the fontTools from <https://github.com/fonttools/fonttools>

But looking rapidly at their doc files, it does not seem they would be able to get or set the value of this design style (at least not unless you really invest time into learning how to do this), so I didn't bother installing or compiling eventually.

Sorry to no have anything more constructive to say!

Bruno Voisin