How to get Lucida Grande on Windows

All the recent news about the Safari 4 beta reminded me of something: the only way to get Lucida Grande on Windows is through Safari, and even then, Safari keeps it to itself (if I remember correctly). So here’s how to set Lucida Grande as a system-wide font on Windows without installing Safari.

  • Download the Safari 3 installer, and don’t run it.
  • If you use a decent file archiver (like 7-zip), you should be able to open the installer as an archive, do that.
  • Extract everything or just navigate inside the installer to SafariSetup3.2.2.exe\Safari\Safari.resources\ and copy Lucida Grande.ttf and Lucida Grande Bold.ttf to C:\Windows\Fonts.
  • Done.

You might need to restart your browser to see pages in the new fonts.

You will notice that a lot of new-ish websites use Lucida Grande as the first font in their CSS font stacks, with Arial or sans-serif behind it. It generally looks pretty good on Windows with ClearType enabled, but wherever it’s being used in bold in small sizes (9 or 10px), looks kind of stretched and not as nice. It might not be to everyone’s liking, but it’s worth a try.

Here’s a comparison of Lucida Grande and Verdana (left and right, respectively):