Ascender Corp. to Offer Complete Family of Lucida Fonts
Ascender Corporation today announced a license to distribute the extensive Lucida family of fonts to End Users, as well as software and hardware developers. The Lucida fonts were designed for optimal display quality for on-screen reading and for printing on low resolution devices. Lucida features extensive Unicode support, and the fonts are available in TrueType, PostScript and OpenType formats.
Chicago, IL (PRWEB) May 25, 2005 -- Ascender Corporation today announced that
it has licensed the complete range of Lucida fonts from Bigelow & Holmes.
Ascender will make the Lucida fonts available for sublicensing by hardware and
software developers immediately. The complete set of Lucida fonts is also
available for immediate end user download from the http://www.AscenderFonts.com web site, in both OpenType
TrueType and PostScript for Macintosh and Windows users.
Lucida is a
highly legible font family featuring a consistent design style and weighting
across many different languages and scripts. Most developers find it to be very
challenging to match a Latin font style and weight to a corresponding complex
script such as an Arabic, Indic or Chinese font. However, the Lucida fonts have
been designed to have a consistent look and feel across many different
languages, whether on-screen or in print.
Ascender will provide extended
language support, customization, and conversion services for developers
licensing Lucida for re-distribution in their products.
The Lucida family
also makes it easy for end users to achieve variety and harmony by mixing and
matching different fonts in the same text and page. The designed coordination of
so many different styles means that when different Lucida fonts are used
together, the effect is lively and interesting but without the confusion of
randomly mingled and uncoordinated fonts.
"The team at Ascender excels in
providing customized font solutions to meet their customers’ specifications"
said Chuck Bigelow, President of Bigelow & Holmes. "We have an excellent
history of working with the team at Ascender and their knowledge and
capabilities in the font industry made Ascender a great partner to provide
Lucida fonts to developers and end users."
"The Lucida font family was
designed as a comprehensive set of fonts that could work well together and
provide a consistent design style" said Brian Kraimer, Vice President of
Ascender Corporation. "The Lucida fonts are also some of the most legible and
highly usable fonts ever created and we are excited to be able to offer them to
our customers."
About the Lucida Font Families
Charles Bigelow and
Kris Holmes, of Bigelow & Holmes, designed Lucida to be a family of
harmonized typefaces that includes a variety of styles: serif and sans-serif,
scripts, monospaced, blackletter and symbols. This extra-large family of type
styles is often called an "extended-family" because it extends beyond the usual
font family that contains just roman and italic, normal and bold. The Lucida
fonts have been licensed by many different software and hardware developers
including Apple, Microsoft and Sun. Because of the richness and variety of its
different styles, Lucida allows new forms of typography for electronic
communication, printing and publishing.
- Lucida Blackletter is a modern
interpretation of an internationally popular style of printing types used for
vernacular literature in northern Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries.
- Lucida Bright has a brilliant look that comes from high contrast
between strong stems and fine hairlines, sharply cut details of serifs and
joins, and tight letter fitting.
- Lucida Bright Math fonts include the
mathematical signs and symbols most used in mathematical, scientific, and
technical composition.
- Lucida Calligraphy is a chancery style script
typeface that is pleasing to read and works well with Lucida Bright
capitals.
- Lucida Casual regular and italic are, well, "casual" cursive
typefaces, based on Kris Holmes' relaxed handwriting with a worn fiber-tipped
pen -- "Just when the tip is getting good and soft and flexible, " she
says.
- Lucida Console is a monospaced font with a large x-height, making it
readable at all sizes and has a wide range of uses including directories,
tables, forms, and faxes.
- Lucida Fax is a family of slab-serif fonts
designed for faxing, dot-matrix printing, screen displays, and other situations
where fonts must be rendered and reproduced at low resolutions or small
sizes.
- Lucida Handwriting is a lively, connected script that brings warmth
and personality to the printed page. More mature but less formal than
traditional school penmanship, Lucida Handwriting combines strong basic letter
shapes into rapidly flowing word sequences.
- Lucida Sans brings a human look
to the sans-serif model. As in Lucida Bright, the inner forms of Lucida Sans are
based on writing styles of the Italian Renaissance and have a more relaxed,
handmade rhythm than the rigid shapes of "grotesque" sans-serifs based on 19th
century industrial type styles.
- Lucida Sans Typewriter adapts the humanized
look of Lucida Sans to the fixed pitch of typewriter fonts, in which all letters
have the same set width. The vertical proportions, strong stem weights, and
crisp details of Lucida Sans are continued in Lucida Sans Typewriter.
-
Lucida Typewriter is a slab-serif monospaced font closely. Lucida Sans
Typewriter is sturdier, darker, and crisper in cut and detail than the Courier
typewriter design related to Lucida Fax.
- Lucida Unicode is based on Lucida
Sans with an extensive character repertoire mapped to the Unicode encoding
standard.
The Lucida fonts can be viewed at the following link: http://www.ascendercorp.com/lucida.html
About Ascender
Corporation
Ascender Corporation (www.ascendercorp.com) is a Chicago-based company specializing
in fonts solutions for hardware and software developers, multilingual Unicode
compliant font solutions and custom font development. The company's founders
have been involved in the development of many of the most highly regarded fonts
presently used in computers, phones and printers. Ascender has the expertise to
solve complex font technology issues, the imagination to create font branding
solutions, and the initiative to create value for our customers.
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Source : http://www.prweb.com/releases/2005/5/prweb243866.htm