Filed under: Text, Office, Freeware
Does SPRANQ's Ecofont really use 20% less ink?
There are plenty of ways to green up your computing environment, from power saving apps like Edison to waste reducers like HP's Smart Web Printing.
What about your typeface of choice? Can an intelligently crafted font really reduce your ink usage by 20%? SPRANQ - a Utrecht-based communications firm - thinks it's possible. To that end, they've put a lot of time and effort into designing Ecofont.
The theory is simple: remove as much black area from a font without adversely impacting its readability.
Ecofont appears a little heavier than the fonts I typically print with, but zoomed to 600% in Photoshop the difference is quite obvious. Ecofont's holes should lighten your ink or toner consumption. Time will tell, and I'm certainly willing to give it a try.
Apart from the font itself, SPRANQ offers a few tips we can all put to good use: remember the environment when selecting your paper, and always try to use efficient printing equipment. I'll add one of my own: for everyday printing, use both sides of the paper if you can (just make sure your printer can handle duplexing first).
[ via Freeware World Team ]
What about your typeface of choice? Can an intelligently crafted font really reduce your ink usage by 20%? SPRANQ - a Utrecht-based communications firm - thinks it's possible. To that end, they've put a lot of time and effort into designing Ecofont.
The theory is simple: remove as much black area from a font without adversely impacting its readability.
Ecofont appears a little heavier than the fonts I typically print with, but zoomed to 600% in Photoshop the difference is quite obvious. Ecofont's holes should lighten your ink or toner consumption. Time will tell, and I'm certainly willing to give it a try.
Apart from the font itself, SPRANQ offers a few tips we can all put to good use: remember the environment when selecting your paper, and always try to use efficient printing equipment. I'll add one of my own: for everyday printing, use both sides of the paper if you can (just make sure your printer can handle duplexing first).
[ via Freeware World Team ]
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
john said 4:03PM on 12-22-2008
Interesting idea. I'm going to give this a try with my HP LaserJet 1320. I could care less about being green and saving the environment (man-made global warming is a myth anyway), I would rather save money on buying toner.
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Peter said 4:27PM on 12-22-2008
Fineprint is great for paper savings too. You can print multiple ups on a single sheet. It reduced the page margins so there isn't a lot of wasted white space and tiny unreadable text. It also lets you easily remove graphics and whole pages that contain nothing but footers.
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JimScar said 5:49PM on 12-22-2008
I agree, john. The same quack that was quoted in Time magazine in 1976 heralding the coming of "The Next Ice Age" is one of the early proponents of the "global warming" theory. He also is one of the first ones to move to "climate change" when short-term data no longer supported "global warming". Let's stop humoring people and spending money to "save the planet", when we're really just making ourselves feel better by "solving" imaginary problems. I'm all for reducing our footprint in our local ecosystems, though, and less used printer cartridges filling up landfills is a great idea. Good one, SPRANQ!
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mxxcon said 9:16PM on 12-22-2008
i think it should be relatively simple to calculate if this font will safe any ink or not.
print a page of text into a pdf or an image file using regular font and this one.
use something like photoshop's math tools to calculate number of black pixels in a given area. if this special font has less pixels, you are saving ink.
Many printer drivers have an option to split a single page into 2 or 4.
Also you can print in DRAFT mode, that will dump less link/tonner on a page.
Many Laser printers also have "economy mode" where it will print only letter outlines, without filling them in.
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Bert said 7:49AM on 12-23-2008
The font may well save toner but what about the impact on the PC and the network?
Doing the print setup and even the display processing the PC has to calculate out all the holes, which will take extra CPU time, make larger files, require more storage time (disk I/O) and network I/O. If you are viewing it on a CRT, there is the energy required to paint the white spaces in the text.
While a document may be printed once, twice or little more, it is viewed many more times certainly one order of magnitude, possibly two. The energy impact, is as important as being able to print 4 more pages from a 5000 page toner cartridge.
There are far more efficient ways of saving toner, like NOT PRINTING EVERY MAIL YOU RECEIVE!!!!
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Thomas said 8:04AM on 12-23-2008
This sounds like a good idea, but ~95% of everything I print is a document that I didn't create (e.g. web page, PDF, screenshot). This would only work for actual text based documents that I create and have some control over the font. I better idea would be to re-evaluate just how much you need to print on paper and try using an app like PDFCreator to really reduce waste.
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A. Barris said 11:29AM on 12-23-2008
I don't see the big deal.
Youv'e been able to do this with just cutting back the % of saturation on any font.
In addition one can always change the black to grey with whatever level desired.
Also, many printers already have a proof mode to do the same thing, so whay destroy the aesthetics of a readable type font.
AB
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linuxuser said 3:16AM on 12-26-2008
Aardvark and Nuke Everything are also quite nifty when printing webpages
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Jan van Es said 11:34AM on 12-29-2008
"A lot of time and effort" seems a bit of an exaggeration - they just adapted an existing open source font (Bitstream Vera Sans regular).
Nobody seems to have noticed that this Ecofont is particularly wide - which means that less characters fit on a line (and on a page). Using a standard typeface like Arial or Helvetica means you get about 15% more text on a page.
And looking at some 9pt text in Ecofont under a microscope, I don't think the difference in toner usage between Ecofont and Vera sans will be more than a few percent.
Also, the lack of proper bold, italic and bold-italic versions won't help acceptance of this font.
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