Lucida® fonts from TUG

The TeX Users Group (TUG) offers a selection of Lucida® fonts designed by Bigelow & Holmes, with support for both mathematical and text typesetting. TUG provides a set of Lucida fonts in OpenType format, and a somewhat different set in Type 1 font format.

• Lucida OpenType can be used with with TeX engines that support OpenType, namely XeTeX and LuaTeX. They can also be used with any OpenType-aware application or system, such as LibreOffice/OpenOffice, Microsoft Word, and Apple iWork. The DK variants (unique to TUG) based on Lucida Grande Mono and Lucida Console are especially suitable for terminal windows.

• Lucida Type 1 is primarily useful with other TeX software, such as pdfTeX and Dvips. The Type 1 fonts can also be used on older Windows systems with Adobe Type Manager.

Additional comparisons: the Type 1 fonts will not be developed further, while the OpenType fonts continue to be actively maintained and developed. For instance, the OpenType fonts support more languages, with a variety of visual improvements to their glyphs and spacing. Lucida OpenType is also one of the few font sets currently supporting OpenType mathematical typesetting, and (uniquely, to our knowledge) provides a bold math variant. The regular-weight Lucida OpenType math font includes a newly-designed script alphabet.

To order the fonts in either format, please use this online order form for the Lucida fonts. (By the way, other TeX-related items, including software and TUGboat journal issues, are available through the TUG store.)

Many other Lucida fonts are available directly from B&H, as well as a blog, newsletter, and more.

Documentation and support

Sample documents using and describing Lucida (both input and output, both OpenType and Type 1) are available for your perusal.

For questions related to ordering or licensing, please email lucida-admin@tug.org, or contact the TUG office.

For technical support, please use the lucida@tug.org mailing list. It is a public list and you are welcome to join the mailing list or search its public archives. (You don't need to subscribe to post.) We cannot guarantee support, but we'll do our best.

A terse description of updates to the fonts is maintained as new releases or made. They're also announced on the mailing list.

Further reading

• Chuck Bigelow and Kris Holmes have provided several informational pages about Lucida, hosted here:
  • Notes on the design of Lucida.
  • The story of Lucida, a brief chronological overview.
  • Typographic facts of Lucida, with considerable information about character sets and languages, and bold and width variants.
  • Notes on Lucida fonts, focused on which good typographic usage of the different styles, and which font combinations work best together.
• B&H wrote an expanded essay in 2014, How and Why We Designed Lucida, and another article in 2018 on Science and history behind the design of Lucida (TUGboat 39:3).
• An extensive interview with Kris Holmes conducted by Dave Walden in 2018 for the TUG Interview Corner (TUGboat 39:3).
• Oral history of Chuck Bigelow (video), conducted for the Computer History Museum in May 2017.
• Chuck wrote an article on the design of the Lucida DK variants, published in 2015 (TUGboat 36:3), following Knuth's discussion of oh's and zeros (TUGboat 35:3).
• Why the Wingdings font exists, by Phil Edwards (updated 2015).
• An extensive interview of Charles Bigelow was conducted by Yue Wang in 2013 (TUGboat 34:2).
• Another incarnation of Lucida: Towards Lucida OpenType, by Ulrik Vieth, a more technical and historical article (TUGboat 32:2, 2012).
• The design of a Unicode font, by Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes. Electronic Publishing, 6(3), 289-305 (September 1993).
• The design of Lucida: An integrated family types for electronic literacy, by Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes. In Text Processing and Document Manipulation, JC Van Vliet, ed., Cambridge, CUP; 1986, pp.1-17.
• Lists of all TUGboat items written by or related to Chuck and Kris.

Licensing and credits

The Lucida fonts are offered only on condition of your acceptance of the Lucida end-user license for named individuals, or the Lucida site license for use throughout an organization. The fonts are not redistributable, freely or otherwise. To discuss an OEM license, please email us.

Web fonts (woff, etc.): the licenses do not permit using the Lucida fonts as web fonts, because there is no practical way for us to limit distribution. It's fine to put normal documents (for example, articles or books in pdf format) using subsetted Lucida fonts on the web. Feel free to email us if questions.

Primary thanks to Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes for generously allowing TUG to offer this to the community—and especially for designing this remarkable typeface family in the first place.

The folks who helped prepare the different releases are acknowledged on the corresponding pages; thanks to all.