Free Font Lucida Calligraphy

From LoveToKnow Web-Design

If you're looking for a free font Lucida Calligraphy is not likely to be the one – with one exception. But with a small investment, the font can be a great addition to any designer's toolkit.

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The Development of Lucida Calligraphy

Calligraphy is by nature a fancy form of lettering descended from the hand-copied parchments of ancient history. Lucida Calligraphy is a modernized form of the "chancery" style, considered eminently readable and very graceful in its form. The entire lettering font is based directly from the handwriting of the Calligrapher Laureate of Oregon, Lloyd Reynolds. Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes designed the Lucida Calligraphy font in 1991 along with several other versions, with script (Handwriting and Blackletter) serif (Bright and Fax) and sans (Sans, Unicode, Grande and Typewriter). Currently the font is owned and licensed by Monotype Imaging.

How and When to Use Lucida Calligraphy

The long stems on letters in fonts are called "ascenders" and "descenders," and are somewhat longer in Lucida Calligraphy than other fonts. For this reason, when used the font looks best with 30-50% more line spacing than normal – for example, an 18-point font size would look best with at least 24-point line spacing. While it is easy to read, especially compared to other script fonts such as Shelley Volante, it is most often used in headings and titles. Sometimes the font is used only for the first letter, with the remaining words in some complementary font such as Lucida Brite.

You can give many different types of documents an extra touch of class with the Lucida Calligraphy font, such as:

Announcements
Personal notes or memos
Invitations
Posters
Greetings
Menus
Placards
Heads
Titles
Information labels
Text paragraphs

Always remember that fonts, especially fancy ones such as Lucida Calligraphy, should be used sparingly for accents and not for large bodies of unbroken text. There are many other rules of web design that also apply to print and marketing materials, and it's best to take some time to learn them or consult with a professional designer before just releasing any kind of professional materials.

False Free Font Lucida Calligraphy Sites

Be careful with sites that may show "Lucida Calligraphy" as a free download – that is likely to be a site that is trying to lure you into downloading some kind of ad or virus that will be at best useless and at worst difficult to get off your computer. Some "font" downloads have turned out to be pretty malevolent viruses, in fact.

On the other hand, there is a way that you can get the free font Lucida Calligraphy, if you have a Mac. It is included in the Microsoft Office for Mac as a TrueType font, and would be available for any documents created with that application. It's not exactly free – you do have to purchase the program – but it is one of hundreds of included fonts, and you don't pay anything more for it.

If you don't use that particular platform or application, you will have to purchase the font from a site such as Fonts.com. This is a secure and trustworthy vendor and allows you to see many versions of the font, including the "waterfall" showing your text at various sizes as well as all the technical details you might want to know, such as versions, history, and even a complete character map.

That last is one of the interesting things about the Lucida font in general. Unlike many fonts, Lucida has a full math symbol version available, which means that the font is almost uniquely suited for scientific papers and presentations. If you are looking for a sophisticated elegance at a cheap price and from a respected source, Lucida Calligraphy may be the font for you.

More Information

For more resources and information about the many free fonts you can find online, don't forget to check out the following LoveToKnow Web Design articles.

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