Missing Lucida Grande font

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MarkP
New to all this
Posts: 2
Joined: Tue Jun 30, 2020 11:23 am

Missing Lucida Grande font

Post by MarkP »

Hi,

When I open Mellel for iPad there is an immediate pop-up message that the Lucida Grande font is missing. A search of App Store whence missing fonts are said to be available does not find anything. Some sources say Apple now uses Helvetica Neue as the alternative for Lucida Grande. Apple’s default font for iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, and macOS is reported to be their own San Francisco or SF.

Document appearance is OK, but I’m wondering what is happening behind the scene. Does Mellel just substitute what it deems to be a suitable font? Does it default to the system default font? Should the default for the provided Mellel documents be updated to a current font, if it matters in any way? Is there any importance for finding and installing Lucida Grande, perhaps for compatibility importing and exporting Microsoft Word documents from collaborators? A bunch of related questions, mainly motivated by necessity of working with collaborators who write in Microsoft Word.

Thank you for insights and perspectives,

Mark
DavidH
Knows everything, can prove it
Posts: 121
Joined: Wed Mar 26, 2008 9:13 pm

Re: Missing Lucida Grande font

Post by DavidH »

Lucida Grande is still available in the Mac OS despite not being a system font anymore. It’s a version of Lucida Sans licensed specially to the Mac which has exceptionally good glyph coverage for lots of languages. It’s the broad language coverage that led Mellel’s developers to use it in many of Mellel’s own templates. Its close counterpart in the Windows world is Lucida Sans Unicode. Except for some details in the design of a few special characters the two fonts are essentially the same. Both have been around for about 20 years. So if you’re moving a document from a Mac machine to Windows (or vice versa) your might have to switch from Lucida Grande to Lucida Sans Unicode (or vice versa). Even if it’s gone from iOS I’d expect Lucida Grande to remain available in OS for a long time, This is an issue about going back and forth between Macs and Windows, not about going back and forth between Mellel and Word as such. (I don’t think Word’s own templates have ever used Lucida Grande.)

I don’t myself use Mellel for the iPad. But my memory is that if you begin a document in either version of Mellel that calls for a font that isn’t currently available, Mellel will substitute an available font for the time being, but if the document is subsequently reopened on a machine that has the font, that substitution will be reversed. So if you compose using a Lucida Grande template on the iPad and then export the document to a Mac that does have Lucida Grande, what you’ll see on the Mac will be Lucida Grande rather than the font you saw on the iPad.

If you don’t care about the language coverage it’s easy enough to make new Mellel templates based on some other sans font widely available on OS, iOS, and Windows alike — e.g. Helvetica Neue if you like the look of both fonts equally well.

I don’t do much with iOS myself but my sense from what I see online is that there’s no routine way to put Lucida Grande back on your iPad if Apple has taken it off, even if you’ve got a copy of the font on a Mac.
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