I wrote the article on Lucida Hybrid almost two years ago, as a remedy to the quirks of Lucida Grande’s less-than-perfect cousins. Since then, it has received quite a number of hits; enough to make an impact on a few stylesheets.
Also since then, things have changed drastically (within the context of the article): Lucida Sans‘ normal weight now displays correctly. Huh.
At first, I thought: “surely, I wasn’t the only one seeing Lucida Sans’ hinting problems whenever I wrote this article…” A few minutes on Google gave me affirmation: others (1, 2) were, at one point or another, experiencing the same problem. Thank Dwayna for screenshots: they would prove I’m not (entirely) crazy.
So, what happened?
A Web Designer Forum thread mentioned that some versions of Windows XP may have shipped with a poorly-hinted version of Lucida Sans. My supplemental guess is that the fix was either pushed via Windows Update, or included in Service Pack 3.
I set out to replicate the problem and come up with a more definitive explanation. I journeyed into the depths of the Interwebs and hunted down all the versions of Lucida Sans I could get my hands on. I tested them, one at a time, to no avail. I then thought of testing different installations of XP to get a more accurate recount, but by that time, I realized I was spending too much time and effort pinpointing the cause of a problem that’s already been addressed.
What of Lucida Hybrid now?
In retrospect, Lucida Hybrid was a fix that got me (and a few others) through some tough times with (an unknown version of) Lucida Sans. And like some fixes, it was pushed into obsolescence and insignificance by a more logical solution (in this case, a properly-hinted update). I guess you could still put ‘Hybrid to use, if only to account for that unknown percentage of computers still with the sub-par ‘Sans. But without a good statistic to rely on, I would have a hard time justifying the trouble of implementing it.
So what is your CSS preference now? A CSS example would be great!
I wonder if this is a safer option. Lucida Sans in my opinion doesn’t look as good as Tahoma on a Windows machine.
Font Family: “lucida grande”,tahoma,verdana,arial,sans-serif
Font Size: 11px
@Jon: It all boils down to the type of look you’re going for (and to a lesser extent, your personal preferences). I use Lucida Sans as it is the closest match to Grande. Something like:
font-family: "Lucida Sans", "Lucida Grande", Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;As I see, the option seems needed to be considered. However partially agreed with your idea.
I just ran into this problem today with my blog which uses “Lucida Sans” as the primary font for body text.
Now this is really, really weird: only in Firefox (3.5.8) on Windows Vista the font looks horribly bold and the italicized text looks awful (like it’s going to fall over). Now, same version of Firefox but on Windows XP -and everything looks a-ok.
Interestingly, this doesn’t happen at all in Chrome, Safari, or IE -just Firefox.
When I change the font to “Lucida Sans Unicode” -it renders fine.
Strange…in any case I think I’ll be ditching Lucida for another typeface.
I found this article, and its predecessor, very interesting! I wonder if your testing brought up a Lucida Sans issue I’m now encountering.
I’m exploring the YUI css service, and defining my H1-H3 series using Lucida Sans, with h3 getting “bold” and “italics”. In Mozilla based browsers (ONLY Mozilla based browsers, I think), I get the lovely Lucida Sans bold italic. Otherwise, however, (Opera, Chrome, IE), I get a bolded slant face.
Why??!
I think I *might* know — my system has “lsansdi.ttf” as the bold-italic Lucida Sans font … but that is officially the “Demibold Italic”, not the “Bold Italic”. Could that be the reason some browsers don’t “see” it?? And if it is … how to deal with it?
For reference:
http://www.fonts.com/FindFonts/detail.htm?pid=242547
Thanks!
I’m unable to replicate your problem, unfortunately. But, I would like you to try something out, anyway:
h3 {font-family: "Lucida Sans Demibold Italic", sans-serif;
font-style: italic;
font-weight: bold;
}
(Browsers seem to correctly interpret a specific font as being a part of its family. Not sure if it would work in your case, though.)
Incidentally, I noticed that as I was trying to create a font stack in Typetester.org, Lucida Sans was not displaying correctly in the browsers you mentioned. Firefox got it right, but all other browsers were only displaying the italic versions of the specified weights. Weird.
Many thanks for taking a look. I tried your suggested code … and everything looks fine. And I took it out again … and it still looked fine! Mind you, I’m on a different machine now (home vs. work), and I’m guessing it’s something specific to that machine I was on earlier.
FWIW, my “test page” is here: http://bit.ly/b2kZIU
I’ll double check tomorrow and confirm. I imagine the situation can’t be helped by the highly similar names given to slightly different fonts. (As your original article seemed to suggest!)
Thanks again!
Right – looks like it is the peculiarities of the local setup on this machine. There are two different “Lucida Sans” installed on the system, and that’s giving rise to the irregularity.
Sorry for the false alarm! There is still something curious going on, but that’s not an issue for here. Appreciate your interest!
Thanks for the info, nonetheless. It further proves my earlier suspicions of a poorly-hinted version of the font.
Great info once again! Thanks a lot:)
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