I saw this in National Geographic magazine 2 days ago and found it a bit interesting.
Take a look at this font below
You probably noticed the holes in the letters, if you print this out you will save ink. According to the Ecofont website you can save up to 20% of ink
After extensive testing with all kinds of shapes, the best results were achieved using small circles. After lots of late hours (and coffee) this resulted in a font that uses up to 20% less ink.
Of course you can save more by not printing at all. 🙂
So I decided to play around with this, I downloaded the font (you can download the font from the download link on this page: http://www.ecofont.eu/ecofont_en.html) and typed up a page in Word 2007. Below is the result:
I increased the font size for every and also compared bold to regular. The last 2 lines have a size of 72.
So what do you think? Does this make sense? Also how much do you print on average? I really don’t print that much at all, at home I don’t even have a printer. As a matter of fact I haven’t used a printer at home for at least 6 years or so
Will you use this font?
Denis has been working with SQL Server since version 6.5. Although he worked as an ASP/JSP/ColdFusion developer before the dot com bust, he has been working exclusively as a database developer/architect since 2002. In addition to English, Denis is also fluent in Croatian and Dutch, but he can curse in many other languages and dialects (just ask the SQL optimizer) He lives in Princeton, NJ with his wife and three kids.
7 Comments
You don’t have a printer at home? How does your wife print coupons?
Seriously, you’ll likely need one as your children will need to write papers and print science projects, etc.
As to the font itself: it looks like it would likely save ink. On the downside, it’s not very readable. It’s a noble effort, but seems almost silly in its execution.
>>You don’t have a printer at home? How does your wife print coupons?
she calls me at work and tells them to print them 🙂
I really don’t use coupons that much except what we get in the mail
Just print in gray and it will use less ink and be more readable. Instead of a few big holes that make it hard to read, it will have hundreds of tiny, evenly-spaced holes in it that simply make it look gray.
Good point E. I wasn’t aware that ink was the thing killing our planet – if you want to save it not printing it out at all seems a better choice? Or are the cartridges the problem?
Alex, I think that it boils down to this
use less ink–>less cartridges needed–>less times trucks have to deliver cartridges to stores–>less cartridges have to be manufactured
So you save in the oil that is used to ship the cartridges and also oil used to create the cartridges since they are made of plastic…but HP won’t be too happy probably
But yeah, don’t print and you even save more…
Does any of you print doublesided?
Yes, unless it is something I need to compare pages side by side for one reason or another.
I downloaded software from the Ecofont website and compared the print out with printing in grayscale. The ecofont print (i printed in the arial font) looked sharper compared to the grayscale output. When you put it under the magnifyer i noticed the holes in the ecofont print out varies in diameter and are exactly in the middle of the letter. In grayscale there were many little holes at a fixed distance. As a result the outline of the letter is not intact. I guess that makes the difference.
BTW I was supprised to see it works with normal fonts, I did not had to install the ecofont with holes.