, with the one exception of Greencloud. It works by spreading the ink more thinly. Your printer driver probably already has a draft mode and you are able to print in grey, but refinements are a smoother pale print, while some programs try to make the edges of letters darker than the middle, or allow different settings for colours or types of print.
. It works by allowing you to cut unwanted pages from a print-preview or combine more than one sheet onto a page. You may already have these on your printer driver or your ink-saving software. Refinements allow you to edit the layout of documents web pages just before printing, maybe cutting-out unwanted ads or tweaking the margins.
The two functions sometimes appear in the same software and often appear in the same search results, showing software with confusingly similar names, so I have made a list of each in alphabetical order, starting here with ink-saving.
.
is a $50 ink saver tool with a 30 day trial period to do things that other programs do for free. It combines up to 8 pages onto a sheet, it allows removal of pages from the print preview, it converts to other file formats, and it does things that possibly someone in the world wants like adding a watermark or counting how many sheets it has printed. C|net's description mentions printing in paler ink, putting it in this ink-saving list but the publishers are quiet about that function so it may belong in the paper-saving list below.
or by quotation for more. It removes holes from the middle of typefaces: Arial, Verdana, Calibri, Times New Roman and Trebuchet.
Legibility looks better for print than screen, so a document written for both would be best with a tweak to the style sheet to use the ecofont version for print and the black version for screen.
The holes are said not to show or not to distract when printed in body text, partly because ragged edges to the print spray will tend to fill them in. There is also a utility for printing only the more relevant parts of a document, a 14-day free demo edition, and anyone can download a free Spranq eco-sans typeface. It's based on a font you'd probably want to use on screen rather than for print and so not a great help but it is free. There is more about the impossible job of balancing cost and readability in a font on one of the re-top paragraphs below headed "Ink-saving fonts - first notes to self now expanded on other pages", which is true: there are other pages on this blog about ink saving fonts.
Ecoprintsaver.com/contact is £35 english-language page from a Japanese company selling ink-saver
software called ecoprint2, sometimes available on english language download sites. It has a 50 day free trial and then costs around £35 - the same price as another english language version of another piece of Japanese ink-saving software called Inksaver.com below. Screenprints suggest that they're different.
Well reviewed on
PC Advisor and
Expertreviews.co.uk with worse user reviews on
C|net Other user star ratings on Softpedia or Fileforum are in the middle of the range as well.
Getdimples.com is a piece of software like ecofont for putting grey in the middle of a shape and not the edge. There is no home edition or trial;
price by quotation only which they state is linked to what you'll save.
Greencloud printer driver from obviousidea.com is the only
free printer driver that can spreads ink
more thinly, and without large acknowledgements printed onto every sheet. After a few trial uses it requries and email address to give a free licence. The free version only sends ten pages at a time to the printer. After a few hundred pages it updated automatically and now has an modest 8pt footnote on each sheet saying "printed with the free version of Greencloud". It works well with another free product called printwhatyoulike.com below. Greencloud makes no claim of patents or subtlety in spreading the ink thinner. They show unusual confidence in their product by their competitors on a public blog post.
My inkjet printed photographs well enough, I thought, on a medium setting but still squirted enough ink to soak through the cheap paper a little, showing that I'm no expert on choices of ink and paper. This printer driver takes a few seconds to load on my XP machine - slower than the driver that came with the printer - but it has thee settings of paleness, a quick tick-box for printing in black ink only, and a neat way of ticking or crossing the pages you wish to print on a display. This screen shot from their web site is from an earlier edition with less icons for deleting pages and less clear options for saving ink. Combining two or four sheets onto a page is the same. The program is
free but requires an email address to receive a free licence code after a few trial uses. A more corporate 27 version with more reporting is available to buy, and donations are encouraged. The paid-for version of this printer driver for any program is more expensive than Leanprint for Word @ $20 and Priprinter personal edition @ £25. There are very few reviews on
C|net
Greenprint 2 from printgreener.com is
$20 software for printing paler - no promises are made about how the print is made pale and whether it's better than any other shade of grey like the draft mode you've already got on your printer driver. There is a page preview that lets you delete unwanted pages, and the latest version will even highlight potentially deletable sections like web page headings according to C|net.
Staples customers may also get a free access code from their account managers, although I can't find a reference to it on the Staples site. I did get a free reward card a few weeks after signing-up to their site which says "want special offers? simply email us and include your member number", so maybe if I emailed I'd get offered greenprint as a freebie.
Greenprint 1 was available to free software hunters.
Reviews of the free Greenprint are on C|net I tried the download on XP and got version 2 of the software, which installs a neat option of a precursor to your usual driver, coloured bright green, and slow to load first time in the day according to their video. All it does is preview pages together, which your software might do for you already. If you're printing from a web page or such it might be useful. Version 2 tries to show you an advert, but the link telling you how to advertise didn't work for me first time. I got an "unexpected error" first time trying to print, and uninstalled before trying anything more. Another link to a
CNet review mentions the company's specially-commissioned condensed font called
Greenprint evergreen regular which gets a
bad review here.
Fineprint.com have a
$50 program from the makers of PDF Factory, with a few features for people who do regular fiddly jobs. There is not much off for quantity. A
free version with a purchase link printed as a bold footnote on each page exists, possibly with a time limit, much as with the similar Priprinter software has a red purchase link.
This is how Fineprint describe the software:
-Universal print previewer
-Delete unwanted pages
-Convert to grayscale
-Lighten content to save ink
-Remove blank pages
-Crop pages
-Edit text
-Print multiple pages on a single sheet
-Print electronic letterhead
-Archive print jobs. The "lighten" function is a tickbox under "convert to greyscale" on newer editions.
Fineprint gets a good review on
PCMag and
high star ratings from C|net users.
https://Inkguard.com charge
$10 a year or $15 for 2 years, and by quotation for larger organisations. The url only works with "https", not "http".
You can also claim a free year's licence if you
buy an ink cartridge from the US company,
reviewed here which also sells industrial inks, pigment, CISS inkjet converstion systems and universal refills.
The graphics of the program are brash, but claims of careful management of ink coverage to reduce overlap are subtle - very similar to Preton below.
Inksaver.com sells Inksaver in english @
$36 for patent methods of making your type grey, running seamlessly in the background after a quick slide of a slider control and printing a preview if you want to show how each level of ink-saving would effect a sample paragraph: the samples are neatly printed on one page.
Medianavi.co.jp is the parent site in Japanese with more variations, more support, and higher prices -
this is a translation. They also sell a program to help you cut the backgrounds off photographs. English and Japanese programs have a free two week trial. I've downloaded a version and found that it makes my black lazerprint address labels hard to read, with a mesh of little holes in the black, but to be fair the program is only intended for ink jets.
Reviews on
http://inksaver.software.informer.com/ Inkfarm.com/Printer-Software-for-Saving-Ink
PCAdvisor.co.uk/features/printing/3291440/10-downloads-to-help-you-save-money-on-printing/
LeanPrint from Adobe is under
$20 for one computer or by quotation for larger offices where it could work well. They don't make it obvious how long the free trial period is, but there is one. According to
PCAdvisor, Leanprint only works on recent adobe software or microsoft word or excel as found in large corporate office, "
using patent-pending methods to redo the layout of documents and intelligent techniques to cut down toner consumption". A video shows text converted at a click to different column and margin sizes instantly, which is impressive (although a cheaper program called
Printeco claims to reduce white space in one click, with no thinning of ink). A PCAdvisor review finds the program rather unfinished except for the specific market of people who use Word, Excel, and recent Adobe products. If an organisation is using them, it could probably save a lot by using open source alternatives from
osalt.com and think about ink later. On the other hand a lot of organisations have a religious devotion to Microsoft and Adobe, so this program could help them. It's also good for large formal organisations where someone sets the page layout centrally; this is a way of laying out the pages better.
Preton.com/technology.asp have a
$33.60 program which claims to reduce overlap of circles made by inkjets and laser printers. Support and use on more terminals cost extra; business packages with ways of controlling your colleagues and setting defaults are sold by quotation. Preton have flirted with free offers but their preton.com/free.asp page now diverts to
Preton.com/pretonsaver_home.asp, with a confusing "free download" label for the trail edition and charges for a second re-installation of the paid-for edition.
Preton gets a 3 star review on C|net .
The program claims to measure saving, but you'd need a very accurate weighing machine under your printer and two identical long print jobs to compare it with default settings or a printers' built-in economy mode. I found one article that claimed 600 dot per inch (dpi) printing looks exactly the same as 300 dpi printing on normal paper, but uses more ink; you can cut costs straight away without special software just by changing the default to 300dpi.
Experience: starting to work more often, but too much trouble. I paid for a software licence to use this on my XP machine and old inkjet printer. I could not find a trial; I don't believe a trial is available, which begs questions about why not. The paid-for software produced a quarter-sized image of my page from Chrome, and then no image at all: it produced error messages to report to Preton. Used from Firefox, I just gets error messages with a screen offering to report them to Preton..I tried asking on their facebook site what page of their help files to look at, but have had no response. After a while I found
/ContactUs_Support.asp on their web site... but the software started working anyway about a month after I bought it. CONTROL+ALT+DELETE on my Windows software shows it running in the background, "PRETON > LAUNCH" on my file menu gets it going a bit more, and if I select an ordinary printer driver from Firefox instead of Greencloud then I get an option to print a test card at six levels of ink saving. The settings are slightly more subtle than Greencloud. Slider switches instead of 0 + 3 fixed levels of ink saving in Greencloud. Three switches for text, graphics and photos instead of one in Greencloud. A day or two later the system stopped working again. Meanwhile I had printed a few letters at diffferent levels of ink saving and magnified them to try to understand this subtle patented technology. Nothing to see. Fairly random dots represent letters - not dots round the edge or anything so subtle.
Meanwhile I think some of the ink is running low so it's not a good test, with black coming-out as red on higher saving levels.
Print and Save from ab-tools.com @ 30 has a slider bar for reducing colour intensity and options for deleting of combining pages from a print preview.
The previous version 1.0 was free on a 14 day trial with a bundle of programs via something called IQinstall that gets bad reviews. Version 1.1 seems to be available from ab-tools.com directly.
Features on the screen shot look the same as the free Greencloud program except that ink-saving is done on a slider bar instead of a choice of three economy settings.
Printfab @ 50 after 30 days' trial is aimed at fiddly photo jobs including more colour profile information than I understand. Screenshots of the different pages look well-designed and clear, so a few of these fiddly jobs might justify the effort of learning how t use them. On the last tab of menus and towards the end of the manual it states
"Total Ink Maximum: with this control you can limit the maximum amount of ink applied per printer dot. Its purpose is mainly to prevent over-soaking of the paper and "bleeding"."
"intensity of colours does not increase linearly with the amount of applied ink ... similar to a saturation curve ... in the upper region an application of 20% more ink results in only a 1% increase in colour saturation. By cutting back in this region, you can save ink quite effectively"
"Combined ink cartridge ... reduce the limit of the ink that tends to be used up first (in most cases the yellow ink) - this was the lifetime of the cartridge can usually be prolonged by up to 30%" Reviews on C|net are positive except for the price.
Priprinter.com - a bundle of pre-press features for regular fiddly layout and editing jobs - ink saving by printing thinner with protection for sharp edges, paper saving by easy deletion of unwanted pages, changing margins with very careful measuring guides and magnifiers. The more expensive version allows automated scripting, saving to pdf, and more detailed editing options. All these options take-up several menu pages which cost in learning time as well as purchase price, but for people who do this work regularly the learning-curve is less important.
There are too many options to describe without understanding them well but the help file says this:
"Inks saving settings are available in the effects tab and optionally in the print preview pane. Ink saving can be controlled with level - from 5 to 70%. Where 5% is related to best quality and less ink saving. 70% gives best ink saving. Amounts in menu are for reference only and may not show results of real savings. However they are quite close. These levels was calibrated on our test pages, mostly made from standard text.
Real saving may vary from page to page, depending on contents. This is absolutely fine, since priPrinter tries to maintain quality of edges. Great number of such edges in relation to solid filled areas can reduce ink saving ratio. At the same time it allows to achieve better quality of the whole printout."
Free with an 18pt red diagonal message on the bottom right corner of your printed page to say "printed with priprinter trial software. Buy at http://pripinter.com", or paid-for with options from
$25 to $95.
Priprinter gets near a 5 star review on C|net http://www.priprinter.com/features.htm
Tonersaver.com appears separate from inksaver. It is geared to recent microsoft operating systems and non-postscript printers. Ink isn't mentioned.
Free paper-saving software
Print driver software to help you spot waste pages is something you might have already. One artical suggests that Samsung printer drivers nowadays offer options for converting to black and white or line drawing. Subtler programs like Printwhatyoulike let you highlight bits to delete from the temporary draft on its way to the printer, making this an good first step to use before one of the grey-scale programs above. Hewlett Packard offer some of their printer driver as a free standalone product for printing web pages from Internet Explorer or Firefox called
HP Smartprint. Mine installed itself in Chrome as well, but hasn't taken to Firefox. It turned my vegan shoe shop front page into a neat grid of pictures that would be a good start for something to send to customers with orders. It left-out one big picture and linked text from the top of the page, concentrating on the detailed grid of pictures further down that it suggested printing under a generic title layout.
There are too many paper-saving print programs to list - some adapting print drivers and others adapting browsers for printing html pages off the screen. They come-up on the same searches as ink-saving programs, so there are also too many to ignore. This is a list of a few.
Printeco @ £5 has a free advertising supported version. It does not spread ink thinly, but does have a one-click refomatting option to reduce white space in a socument. I mean document. It works in windows 7 or 8 and doesn't mention Windows XP but seems to work on it. It prints from a limited number of programs and the free version puts a tiny advert for an ink company on the top right of your Word menu. There is a Chrome browser version.
C|net gives them a mention and mentions plans for a future office suite.
Printfriendly.com also tries to cut-out the complication of making printer-friendly versions of any page, so you can have an
automatically-updated printer-friendly link for any page like this one for this site, without having to write a CSS file. I find that
the draft for my commercial site - a vegan shoe shop - doesn't show enough of the pictures I'd like to print for customers. When I last looked, it showed one big picture from the top of the page and left-out all the smaller ones. The page may have changed since then.
Printwhatyoulike.com is similar with more options by default.
I find the draft for my vegan shoe shop a lot more promising at a first go. You can also use it from their web site to process any url, so there's no need to download or install anything if you're using someone else's computer. I've taken to using it as a first choice, and hope to use something like Greencloud or Preton as well in order to make the images a bit paler and not to soak through the paper so much.
More obscure are programs that add an extra printer driver with extra printer options, for any kind of print.
Clicktoconvert.com/iprint/ - free print driver that identifies empty pages, helps you remove pages from the total print queue, and makes 2-per-page easy. I've installed a copy as my existing print driver was quite basic, and now have an option to print 2 or 4 to a page or reduce size which I didn't have before. It loads like an alternative printer. Clicktoconvert.com sell cheap software for converting to html and pdf.
Obviousidea.com/windows-software/greencloud-printer/is a similar free print driver that I've put in the top paragraph next to paid-for software because it has an option to spread ink more thinly
Ink-saving fonts - first notes to self now expanded on other pages
Spranq eco sans saves ink compared to Deja Vu sans, the open-source Verdana-like screen font that it copies except for holes towards the middle of the shapes. Obviously, people print in grey or "draft mode", with holes evenly distributed throughout the shapes, but Spranq think their system emphasises the edges more, to aid readability. They think you hardly notice the grey, and the interest created by a new font might encourage you to use it anyway if you weren't using draft mode.
Century Gothic saves ink compared to Spranq Eco Sans, because it's light and spindley, with a bit of fatness to compensate. You need more narrower margins to fit the same text on a page at the same point size. It might also be tiring to read as paragraphs; one glance suggest it should be used on the bold setting, which is like a fat Helvetica. Spranq sell software for taking holes out of other typefaces, including Century Gothic if you want to pay; that's a more fair comparison.
It's probably possible to compare serif typefaces in the same way: Ryman Ecofont is grey by default v Garamond which is black. Ryman do not sell software for making text grey in a readable way; they just give-away the one grey serif font made of lines along the pattern of the shapes to appear almost black.
If you have £18 to spend you might try an all-grey font designed to look black at paragraph sizes:
Fontcraft inksaver . Some free fonts are listed below.
Finally, one article states that inkjet printers should be left on standby. Turn the mains off by pulling-out the flex if you really have to, because plugging it in again might not trigger their re-booting cleaning cycle that wastes a lot of ink. Using an inkjet regularly is another way of saving this cleaning cost. Another article suggests the opposite: use a surge protector to avoid your printer using any trickle of current while on standby.
is a classic machine font.
In the UK where there is no formal address format, you can reduce ink by aiming for three lines as a default, and suggesting three lines on any boxes where people fill-in their addresses, so that the writer has to think what the essentials are, and may leave-off a bit of free text like a job title, a name of a trading estate, or a county.
The body of the text should be readable by humans with serif typefaces generally found easier to read. 10-word ragged right columns work well for newspapers. Humans are those things that aren't computers, and include humans over 50 without their specs on who like 13-point, humans in two minds about whether they want to read the text or like reading at all, humans in bad light with the TV on as a distraction, and humans trying to read while commuting. Humans trying to deliver for Royal Mail as temporary staff, working when it's cold and rainy are particularly important. It shouldn't matter how the text is crammed on a page to suit humans, but fat text will need smaller margins or lower line spacing and so be less easy to read. A two column layout with a ragged right margin might be possible on an A4 sheet, although surprising, and Adobe's leanprint solution might be able to re-format automatically if that helps.
April 13th, 2009 at 8:12 pm
Or if you’re really concerned about saving ink/toner, just stop printing.
April 20th, 2009 at 9:01 am
April 26th, 2009 at 3:49 am
Sanserif fonts like Arial are grand for headlines, not so good for the body of the text. Sure you’ll save some money, but you’ll wear out the reader. Those little tails, the serifs, on fonts like Garamond help lead the eye along.
If you’ve just printing tons of crap and you don’t think it matters if anyone reads it, then hey, use Helvetica. But if you are writing something important or worthwhile, OR, if other people are compelled to read it, then don’t make them suffer to save yourself a couple of cents.
For the body of text, Arial sucks.
April 26th, 2009 at 9:07 pm
If you want to use a serif font, you’ll notice from the chart that Times New Roman (a serif font) handily beats out Arial in efficiency.
Arial sees such widespread use primarily because it’s the default in programs like MS’s Word and Internet Explorer. But Century Gothic is far more efficient in terms of ink usage.
I myself prefer Garamond as well. It’s just a friendlier font that invites the reader’s eye to peruse the page. But when efficiency counts, like for drafts and things, I think I’ll probably switch to Century Gothic. Buying all those ink cartridges really bites you in the wallet!
June 7th, 2009 at 1:50 am
They’ve taken a very plain font and punched tiny holes in all the glyphs in such a manner that it doesn’t detract from readability.
November 21st, 2009 at 3:25 am
Also for your information, those little tails, stressed lines, sagging umlauts and dots at the ends of the letterforms, all mean that you’re printing in the German.
November 22nd, 2009 at 6:56 pm
March 26th, 2010 at 4:25 pm
Thanks, Gary
March 31st, 2010 at 3:07 pm
I too would like to see the comparisons at the same font size. Changing the font size would change the amount of ink used Until the font sizes are the same this test does not prove Century Gothic is cheaper than Arial because the fonts sizes are different.
The reason for changing the fonts to 10 point vs 11 point was for filling the page. The test should be done so all words fit on one page with the exact same words for each font. This would be an accurate test to prove which font saves money.
By using Arial at 10 point I might save more money than with Century Gothic, but this test doesn’t give me those numbers.
With my preliminary testing I found using the same point size for Arial and Century Gothic and having lengthy text. I would use more paper with Century Gothic. The exact same text at the same point size fitting on a page with Arial would flow onto a second page with Century Gothic.
March 31st, 2010 at 7:36 pm
Do you ever use EcoFont? I am curious as to how this compares.
March 31st, 2010 at 9:41 pm
I don’t myself, but if you check on our table, you’ll see that even EcoFont came in second to Century Gothic.
April 1st, 2010 at 3:47 pm
Consolas 10.5, Century Gothic 10, Calibri 11, Times Roman 11, Arial 11, and Ecofont 10. Consolas 10.5 is the default plain text email font at our college. Our default html font is Calibri 11 which according to test results in the article is about 9% more wasteful than Century Gothic 10. I think the point size differences are understandable since some fonts run small or large. Subjectively I liked Time Roman 11 for the combination of clarity and ink efficiency (in the top three along with Century Gothic and Ecofont). I am surprised it is that good in ink efficiency. I’m looking into it and considering changing to this as the default font for our college to give the best bang for the buck with the least ink.
April 5th, 2010 at 7:17 pm
"The test should be done so all words fit on one page with the exact same words for each font"
That is exactly what they did by changing the font. I agree that it is not entirely scientific though. What they should have probably done is figured out a way to "shrink to fit" everything on one page and done the test that way.
Its tough but I’m sure there is a way to make an exact comparison. Basically you want the same word count per page regardless of the font size. They were closer than just using the same font size across all fonts in this experiment but it seems to be a bit more of an "eye-ball" measurement than some kind of math calculation.
This is a great start though. I brought this up in our stuff meeting this morning and everyone got really excited about it.
April 6th, 2010 at 9:40 pm
Why change the fonts if you can optimize the amount of ink used to print all fonts, graphics, and images?
April 7th, 2010 at 9:39 am
April 7th, 2010 at 2:56 pm
Print using GARAMOND. Try it out and you will experience savings on ink and paper.
April 7th, 2010 at 5:03 pm
On a one-page document that won’t matter, but in a book, that can mean many additional octaves (pages of eight, which is the standard for books), which is more expensive.
Has anyone priced that?
April 7th, 2010 at 6:59 pm
I’m no math major and I hope I’ve calculated this correctly but:
Based on the studies’ assumption of 25 pages/week home use and 250/week for business when using any of the fonts the Canon is roughly 260% more expensive than the Brother:
For Century Gothic:
Canon – $0.0356/page
Brother – $0.0137/page
Even using Franklin Gothic the Brother is only $0.022/page. If the target is to save money buy a printer with cheaper ink, then use the most efficient font for your document needs. For the life of me cannot understand why printer ink costs $5,200 / gal. (Canon – 11ml = $15) other than we have been conditioned to pay it. Color is over $8,400 / gal.!
If you want to be green forget the ink, focus on the paper.
Sometimes I think the printer companies picture us with a big sucker sign slapped to our backs. Maybe they\’re right.
April 7th, 2010 at 7:39 pm
April 7th, 2010 at 7:40 pm
April 8th, 2010 at 2:54 am
April 8th, 2010 at 4:10 am
April 8th, 2010 at 11:03 am
2) Size matters but some fonts use more ink. Valhalla says "…but doesn’t seem any thicker in the lines", correct, and also says "Takes up more space than Century Gothic", but that is in the horizontal not in the vertical.
Please, check Courier New.
April 8th, 2010 at 12:05 pm
[Futura is a lot like Century Gothic, but slightly condensed]
April 8th, 2010 at 1:42 pm
April 8th, 2010 at 3:15 pm
April 8th, 2010 at 3:52 pm
What if I print 1000 pages per month, is that $320 per year?
April 8th, 2010 at 4:12 pm
I am currently working on a 140 page document, which is in Arial font. When I switched to Century Gothic, the number of pages increase to 150.
That’s a 7% increase in the number of pages, which is not negligible.
April 8th, 2010 at 5:36 pm
1.
The request to test additional fonts has been heard, loud and clear! Our original testing was done about a year ago, and since then the Ecofont has been redesigned, and I now know that people are in love with various
2.
To those discussing the fact that different font sizes can have an impact on readability and the length of a document– of course you are correct. I think the thing to keep in mind is that we conducted a controlled test, which has to make certain assumptions and must keep certain aspects of the test constant to get meaningful results. Our results should only be used as one piece of input into your decision about what font to choose for your particular document. Just as there are hundreds (thousands?) of fonts to choose from, there is no single answer to the question “what font should I use in this document?”
3.
To the person commenting on the fact that the choice of PRINTER is more important than font to save money while printing, you certainly have a good point. That’s one of the reasons we created http://printer.com, so that we can expose the true cost of ownership of a printer, taking into account usage and the cost of ink over several years. I personally have found that buying a “cheap” printer is not so cheap in the long run. These “cheaper” printers tend to have much smaller ink cartridges, therefore you have to change cartridges more often. Even if the smaller cartridges are marginally cheaper than bigger ones, over a several year period you can find yourself spending WAAAAY more for ink than if you had purchased a more expensive printer (with larger cartridges) to begin with.
Bob Crum
Printer.com
April 9th, 2010 at 12:12 pm
Ecofont software will be available end of June.
Kind regards, The Ecofont Team
April 10th, 2010 at 1:19 am
April 11th, 2010 at 5:27 am
April 11th, 2010 at 4:55 pm
April 12th, 2010 at 2:11 pm
Arial and other serf fonts are on the other hand better for screen reading.
April 13th, 2010 at 11:22 am
Of course the space occupied is something defined by the font itself, and also by the font size. But if we compare different fonts, i think a better hypothesis should be the same font height (due to readability) and not the number of page occupied.
April 13th, 2010 at 1:59 pm
April 16th, 2010 at 1:05 am
April 16th, 2010 at 9:29 pm
April 19th, 2010 at 12:54 am
April 24th, 2010 at 7:33 pm
I wanted to let all of you know that we at Printer.com have discussed an additional round of testing, Phase 2, and we believe that we will do this. We are looking at all of your suggestions of what fonts we should test. In addition, we want to wait for the new Ecofont, which apparently won’t be available until the end of June. So…stay tuned.
Also, the test we did last year is not available in any form that we could make available for download. We didn’t anticipate that need, and didn’t prepare for it. However, we are looking at a brief we could create for this Phase 2 testing. Again…stay tuned.
Bob Crum
Printer.com
April 27th, 2010 at 1:32 pm
So those studies should be extended to analyse also the font change in relation to the paper usage.
With kind greetings
Tobias
P.S.: Sorry if my english might be a little bit difficult to read or wrong sometimes for native speakers. I’m from germany.
April 29th, 2010 at 5:40 pm
May 3rd, 2010 at 9:01 am
May 3rd, 2010 at 2:40 pm
Print less – The less you print the more you save.
Write less – edit your documents. Most texts are too wordy.
May 5th, 2010 at 10:13 pm
https://www.ecofont.com/en/products/green/printing/saving-printing-costs-and-eco-friendly/why-ecofont-saves-more-ink-than-century-gothic.html
May 6th, 2010 at 2:18 am
To Preston:
Yes, of course, printing with compatible or remanufactured cartridges is certainly a way to save money over the use of OEM cartridges. Some people even elect to refill their own cartridges with ink and toner, thus saving even more. It is up to individuals to determine if this is something they would like to try.
To Yordan:
Our original testing was done in early 2009, and this blog entry was posted on April 13, 2009. At that point in time, the only Ecofont was the “original” one, which is explained in the last paragraph of the link you provided. Since that time, the Ecofont people “…decided to develop Ecofont into software that shoots holes in EVERY font.” The entry you reference was posted by the Ecofont people recently, after the story about the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay broke, so I don’t think it’s a matter of “checking sources” better, but rather taking into account the timeline of what has happened. The new Ecofont software will be availble in June, and we are contemplating how it could be included in our “Phase 2″ testing that we are considering.
May 6th, 2010 at 3:55 pm
May 6th, 2010 at 5:01 pm
May 6th, 2010 at 5:21 pm
May 6th, 2010 at 9:07 pm
I’m not sure it was clearly stated in the comments above. Let’s take the example of 140 pages of Arial being 150 pages in Century Gothic. If I read it right, 140 pages of Century Gothic at 3.45% coverage is cheaper than 140 pages of Arial at 5%. But I had to print an extra 10 pages. That is 10/140 more pages/ink. The percentage to use for cost savings, if I’m doing this right, is 3.45 + 3.45 * 10 / 140, or 3.45 + .25 or 3.7%. That makes it more like $49.68 for the year.
Thus I don’t think you can ignore this in order to get accurate meaningful results.
thanks,
chris
May 19th, 2010 at 8:07 pm
the simplest solution is to use toner / ink saving software like Inksaver.com or PretonSaver.
it will save up to 70% of your toner and ink usage, i use Pretonsaver.
I don’t know about ink saver, but pretonsaver has a free trial.
May 20th, 2010 at 2:23 am
I would, specifically, like to know how Arial 10 is vs. Century Gothic 10… Not 11 vs 10 like in the chart.
June 16th, 2010 at 9:02 am
June 22nd, 2010 at 5:14 am
March 2nd, 2011 at 2:18 pm
It works with your current fonts, so no need to change your docs or house style. You can also print Century Gothic in Ecofont style for the ultimate saving.
It doesn’t matter if you have a HP, Ricoh, Xerox, Canon, Lexmark, Oki, Lexmark, Samsung, Sharp or any other printer/copier. You can save more than 25% toner on all devices.
August 5th, 2011 at 9:13 am
November 13th, 2011 at 2:13 am
February 19th, 2012 at 10:52 pm
April 26th, 2012 at 11:11 am
May 24th, 2012 at 8:21 pm
June 29th, 2012 at 4:11 am
To learn more, check out my post.
http://ebeeler.blogspot.com/2012/06/comparing-apples-oranges-and-fonts-how.html
June 29th, 2012 at 7:15 pm
http://ebeeler.blogspot.com/2012/06/comparing-apples-oranges-and-fonts-how.html
August 8th, 2012 at 1:02 pm
September 18th, 2012 at 2:51 pm
It there a way to know the results or has there been a study done on this?
Thanks