TUGboat, Volume 32 (2011), No. 2 169 Another incarnation of Lucida: now be set up for use with TEX using fontinst or Towards Lucida OpenType afm2tfm. This development continued when PDFTEX was Ulrik Vieth and Mojca Miklavec developed and on-screen viewing of PDF files came Abstract into common use in the late 1990s. While the use of METAFONT-generated bitmap TEX has been in existence for more than 30 years. fonts packaged into Type 3 fonts was still acceptable During this time, TEX engines and device drivers for printing, such bitmap fonts turned out to be in- have gone through multiple generations of font tech- adequate for screen rendering in PDF viewers. As a nology: METAFONT, PostScript Type 1, and Open- result, the use of METAFONT fonts became unpop- Type. While choices for text fonts have greatly in- ular, and efforts were undertaken to provide Type 1 creased, there have always been few choices for math replacements for METAFONT fonts. fonts and even fewer for complete font families. In this era, choices of text fonts were increased The Lucida family of typefaces by Bigelow & significantly, but choices of math fonts remained lim- Holmes is a notable exception, as it provides not ited. Besides CM and AMS Euler, converted from only a math font, but also a complete font family, METAFONT, there were only the commercial offer- consisting of a large repertoire of serif, sans-serif, ings of MathTime and Lucida New Math at first. monospace, and fancy variants. Unfortunately, the It was only much later in this era that more current distribution of Lucida fonts dates back to choices of math fonts eventually became available, 1993 and is limited by the use of PostScript Type 1 such as txfonts, pxfonts, mathpazo, fourier, and fonts, which support only 8-bit character sets. mathdesign, providing companion math fonts for In this article, we report the current status of an use with popular text typefaces, such as Times, Pala- ongoing joint project of Bigelow & Holmes and TUG tino, Utopia, Charter, and Garamond. to develop a new distribution of Lucida OpenType Nevertheless, as we are nearing the end of this with better Unicode language and math support. era, these choices of math fonts are still very few 1 Historical perspective of font technology compared to the vast number of available text fonts, and it took more than a decade to get there. TEX has been in existence for more than 30 years. During this time, TEX engines and device drivers have evolved through multiple generations of font The era of OpenType fonts In recent years, technology (METAFONT, Type 1, OpenType) and TEX has entered yet another era of font technology, multiple generations of output formats (DVI, Post- as OpenType fonts are now becoming the preferred Script, PDF). font format to support the needs of Unicode. Many font vendors have switched their commer- The era of METAFONT fonts When T X was E cial offerings from Type 1 to OpenType format, and first developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Type 1 fonts are becoming obsolete due to their lim- there were no established standards of font technol- itations to 8-bit character sets. ogy which could be used, so METAFONT was devel- With the development of X TE EX and LuaTEX in oped as a companion to TEX, and all related file recent years, new TEX engines have become available formats for font metrics (TFM) and bitmap fonts which support Unicode input and OpenType output (PK) were invented as well. directly, without the need for a complicated setup of As it turned out, METAFONT never caught on TFM font metrics or font map files. with font designers, so there were very few choices At the same time, support for virtual fonts is for fonts available for use with T X in this era, both E being phased out in packages such as ConT Xt MkIV, for text and math typesetting. Besides the earliest E making it difficult to continue to use Type 1 fonts instances of METAFONT fonts, Computer Modern with virtual fonts in those packages. and AMS Euler, there were only a few more, most As we are entering this era of font technology, of them variants of the above, such as Concrete and there is once again a need to develop replacements CM Bright. for existing fonts, this time providing OpenType re- The era of PostScript Type 1 fonts When Post- placements for Type 1 fonts. Script printers came into use in the early 1990s, With the development of the Latin Modern and TEX entered another era of font technology, as scal- TEX Gyre fonts in recent years, replacements for the able Type 1 fonts became the preferred format. It Computer Modern text fonts and several common became possible to use the commercial offerings of PostScript fonts already exist, but the correspond- Type 1 fonts from many font vendors, which could ing math fonts are still under development. Another incarnation of Lucida: Towards Lucida OpenType 170 TUGboat, Volume 32 (2011), No. 2 At the time of writing, choices of full-featured fonts on MS Windows [6, 7], the Lucida Grande fonts OpenType math fonts remain limited to Cambria on Apple Mac OS X [8], and a set of Lucida fonts dis- Math (developed by Microsoft), Asana Math (de- tributed with Sun’s Java Development Kits (JDK). rived from pxfonts) and XITS Math (derived from All of these fonts are in TrueType format and STIX fonts). Additional choices of OpenType math provide some level of Unicode coverage, some of fonts are still unfinished, such as Neo Euler (derived them even including support for non-Latin scripts from AMS Euler) and Latin Modern Math (derived such as Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew, etc. from Computer Modern Math). Unfortunately, most of these Lucida Unicode With the addition of Lucida Math as another system fonts provide only single font instances or choice of OpenType math fonts under development, incomplete font families, so they are not really well we are about to reach the same level of font support suited for sophisticated typesetting. in the OpenType era that was available in the early As a result, users who want to use Lucida for years of the PostScript era in the mid-1990s. typesetting with TEX are essentially stuck with the Nevertheless, the general trend continues also Type 1 distribution of the early 1990s, providing in the OpenType era in that there are few choices for only a limited 8-bit character set and requiring the math fonts and even fewer for complete font families. use of virtual fonts to support accented languages, which is no longer up to the requirements of mod- 2 History of Lucida font distributions ern TEX engines geared toward Unicode typesetting The Lucida family of fonts was developed by the with OpenType font technology. Bigelow & Holmes foundry of Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes in the mid-1980s [1]. At this time, 3 Scope of the Lucida Type 1 distribution Chuck Bigelow was on the faculty at Stanford, so The current distribution of Lucida Type 1 fonts for he was well aware of the development of TEX and use with TEX was originally developed in the early the Computer Modern fonts by Don Knuth. A pri- 1990s by Bigelow & Holmes and Y&Y Inc. It is mary goal of Lucida was to create a typeface design now being supported and sold directly by TUG. The which would digitize well, even at relatively low res- TUG distribution consists of two font packages: Lu- olutions. cida Basic and Lucida Complete [9, 10]. Another goal of Lucida was to provide a com- The basic distribution provides three complete plete font family of matching designs for serif, sans- font families: Lucida Bright, Lucida Sans Type- serif, and monospace fonts, which were later aug- writer, and Lucida New Math (Fig. 1). mented by a number of fancy variants [2]. The complete distribution adds the following Yet another goal of Lucida was to provide an ex- font families: Lucida Sans, Lucida (Serif) Type- tensive character set, including Latin, Greek, sym- writer, Lucida Fax, Lucida Casual, as well as several bols, and even dingbats, so that the fonts could be fancy variants: Lucida Blackletter, Lucida Calligra- used for math typesetting as well. (The dingbats phy, and Lucida Handwriting (Fig. 2). fonts were later distributed independently [3].) Given the limitations of Type 1 technology, the The original versions of Lucida fonts from the fonts are based on an 8-bit character set. mid-1980s are still being sold by some font vendors The recommended setup suggested by Y&Y Inc. under the names of Lucida Serif and Lucida Math, was to use the so-called TeXnANSI encoding (LY1), but these versions were never really supported with which combines parts of the 7-bit old TEX encoding a setup for use with TEX. (OT1) in the lower half with the Windows ANSI 1252 The current versions of Lucida fonts were ex- encoding in the upper half [11, 12]. tended and revised for use with TEX in the early An alternative setup suggested by the (LA)TEX 1990s in cooperation with Y&Y Inc., in particular community was to use the so-called TeXBase1 (8r) its principal Berthold Horn for TEX-specific adjust- encoding as a base font encoding for virtual fonts, ments. Y&Y sold the fonts under the names of Lu- implementing the 8-bit Cork text and text compan- cida Bright and Lucida New Math for many years, ion encodings (T1 and TS1). until the company was dissolved. The same font Since the Cork encoding extends considerably packages are now being supported and sold directly beyond the scope of Windows ANSI 1252 (Latin 1), by TUG [4] and by PCTEX Inc.