Lucida on PC Ain’t So Grande
I will never resist the opportunity for a pun, no matter how terrible. Those of you who visit this site are treated to careful typographic consideration in Lucida Grande. Those of you who visit on a PC are not so lucky, as you get Arial. (Really it should be Helvetica, but I meant to swap that out long ago and forgot. Here’s a comparison of Lucida Grande and Helvetica.)
This bugs me quite a bit, as at the office I work on a PC and must endure the ugly type. Obviously, the appropriate leading and kerning for Lucida is not appropriate for Arial. Since most sites I work on use Verdana or Helvetica, I haven’t really had to worry about PC/Mac type compatibility issues. Additionally, I could maybe name 5 PC system fonts if pressed. Not wanting to do messy conditional hacks (avoid these like the plague) I sought a better PC alternative for Lucida Grande. I discovered that Lucida Sans Unicode is purported to be nearly identical, as illustrated in the visuals below.
I popped open the stylesheet, slipped Lucida Sans Unicode in, and refreshed. I didn’t care for the results. It didn’t really look the same at all.
Unless I’m crazy, the leading was totally different. The size didn’t look that different to me, but since leading is controlled by line-height in CSS, I have to assume these forms are not identical. Later, I found some evidence to support my findings.
The hinting differs greatly: the stems in Lucida Sans Unicode turn into two pixels at 15 ppem while in Lucida Grande they only do so at 18 ppem. The 17 ppem size of Lucida Grande uses 1-pixel stems plus antialiasing, which does not at all work well in the normal Windows 2000/XP rasterizer. This is evidence that the font has not been hinted with Windows in mind but was specifically hinted for Mac OS X where it works great. However, in Windows XP ClearType, it is Lucida Grande that performs better than Lucida Sans Unicode, which evidently has been “overhinted” and displays a weird high linear contrast up to 24 ppem, while the stems in Lucida Grande appear pleasantly equalized already from 18 ppem on.
So not only is the size different, the hinting is as well.
Additionally, Lucida Sans Unicode doesn’t come with italic and bold faces, so they’re forced by the system resulting in characters which look as if they might topple over. A suggested alternative was to specify Lucida Sans for bold and italics. Strangely, my system only has Lucida Sans Unicode and not Lucida Sans. Since I have a pretty standard installation of XP Professional, I must assume that’s the case for other people and can’t rely on this. So with those issues in mind I reverted back to Arial as my plan B face, and plan to work it out over the weekend.
In the mean time I installed Lucida Grande on my PC, hoping to at least ease my eyes when reading here at work. Unfortunately, because Lucida Grande was designed specifically for Mac, it just looks wrong. Maybe only I would notice since I go home every night to my iMac after 9 hours on a PC, but it’s so bizarre looking I might just have to uninstall it. I have the same spatial issues with it on PC as I did Lucida Sans Unicode, which shouldn’t happen. For those of you PC users curious about Lucida Grande, you can download it here. It won’t look bizarre for regular PC users (on screen I find it much more readable than Helvetica/Verdana/Arial), but if you switch between Mac and PC you might be dissatisfied.
