LCARS Fonts

When asked on Twitter what font was used for LCARS, Michael Okuda responded:

"I mostly used Helvetica Ultra Compressed. I also used Letraset Compacta, and a couple of others when I had to." @MikeOkuda

Unfortunately, I was unable to use the traditional LCARS fonts for this template. This is mainly because not everyone has the above fonts installed on their computer. As a solution, I chose to use Google Fonts. I searched until I found a font that would pass for the LCARS style. The first font I found was 'Oswald', which I used through LCARS Version 7. In May of 2021, I discovered 'Antonio' which even more closely matched the LCARS style font and it is what I am still using today.

If you look in the head section of the HTML page included with the pre-Ultra template files, you will find this:

		
						<link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.googleapis.com">

						<link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.gstatic.com" crossorigin>

						<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Antonio:wght@400;700&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">

This means that the font - 'Antonio' - is being served from Google. So keep in mind that if you are working on your website offline, the 'Antonio' font will not load and will fall back to a font installed on your computer. For Macs and iOS the fallback font is 'Avenir Next Condensed'. In the case of Windows this would be 'Arial Narrow', which would not look as nice as 'Antonio', but at least it won't break the template.

Note: LCARS Now Handles Fonts Differently

With the latest version of LCARS, I opted to self-host the LCARS font (Antonio) rather than use Google. I made this change because a German court ruled that using Google's font library violates EU's General Data Protection Regulation. So Antonio is baked into Ultra with no reliance on Google's servers, and bypasses any legal conundrums with the European Union.