April 22, 2005 at 10 AM
Clearly Lucida
One day I noticed that a web page I was looking at was rendering in a font I didn’t recognize. (You might ask, “So what?”, but this is strange when one is as type-obsessed as I.) The font was Lucida Bright, which is a serif type closely-related to Lucida Grande (aka Lucida Sans), the font used everywhere in Macintosh OS X. It’s somewhat common on Windows computers, but I had never seen Lucida Bright in any of my font selection boxes, or in any of my font folders.
After some investigation, I discovered that an entire copy of the Lucida family exists on every OS X system. That includes Lucida Bright (with demibold and italic), Lucida Sans (also with demibold and italic — Lucida Grande doesn’t include the italic) and Lucida Sans Typewriter, a fixed-width font good for programming or the Terminal (also including bold and oblique). They’re hidden away though, these fonts, in a folder no one would ever look in, as part of the Java package.
Go to the Finder, and use the Go to Folder command (in the Go menu), and paste in /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/ Versions/CurrentJDK/Home/lib/fonts (omit any space before Versions) and you will be taken to a folder containing TrueType versions of the fonts. If you copy them (and make sure you copy; don’t move them) to your user font folder (i.e. /Users/Yourname/Library/Fonts/), you should be able to use them in your applications.
Voila!
Previously: A Design Blog?
Subsequently: Happy Birthday, Mom
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