Garamond fails this quick standard test in HP lazerjet draft mode, but so do other fonts.
This is a slightly daft post because I'm not sure how to specify an unusual font on blogspot. If the typeface looks like something out of a 1930s american magazine, that's Garamond, otherwise not. Never mind. The source code for specifying a font works for a bit but tangles-up after a few edits. The other font links above make more sense. Anyway I get paypal emails that are a very good practical test of one use for a font. They say: "someone has bought your item and the address somewhere down the blurb is name street numberbla bla bla bla bla bla postcode or zip code bla bla the email carries on, and 12pt font shows what paid and what for on the same page"
These verbose emails are a good source of customer's delivery addresses in a format you can bung inside a used window envelope and send without re-typing. If you want to avoid editing, then you need about 12pt type to get the payment amount on the same side of paper.
Garamond does not work well on screen at 12pt. Click the link & control+F to "the reason" to see the reason why. I have not read what the link says but it looks plausible.. Larger than 12pt it is still hard to read, and the email needs editing to get the vital payment amount and address onto one side of paper. Garamond does not print well on HP lazerjet draft mode - that is in grey at 300 dpi. I can hardly read it at 12pt. The chances of it workng as well as OCRB for optical character recognition at a sorting office look low. This is a pity, because I thought while writing previous posts that Garamond provided was the best balance between ink costs and readabiliy. Now I think that if an ebay sale is to be trusted to the
scanners at the post office to recognise the right address and get it the right postie quickly without delay and human error
posties to poke it through the right letterbox...
...then spindly type in barely legible grey is not the answer. Never mind. Maybe there is some way of setting email software to display paypal emails in a certain way. Infinate wisdom will be available on this blog some time, if not quite yet. Oh this last bit is just about getting hold of Garamond font for free. You may well have Garamond as one of your bundle of fonts that is
somehow on your computer. If not, google an open source version which
exists and copy the unzipped download files to your fonts folder. To
find the fonts folder, search your disk for .ttf of .o ... no I've
forgotten the second one, but those are the two file name endings most
used for font files which are vector graphics of the extended alphabet
in whatever font. There's also a way of getting google's online version which I've tried to use on this document while somehow stripping-out the line breaks
Dear Veganline.com,
You received a payment of £29.99 GBP from person (person78@example.com)
Thanks for using PayPal. You can now send any items. To see all the
transaction details, log in to your PayPal account.
It may take a few moments for this transaction to appear in your
account.
<h3>This item is eligible for Seller Protection.</h3>Don't
forget to:- Send the item to the delivery address below within 7 days.
Please note: items delivered in person or to a different address are not
covered by Seller Protection.
- Use a trackable proof of delivery.
Find out more about Seller Protection
Reversals:Please be aware that your payment can still be reversed, (e.g.
if it is subject to a chargeback), even after you have sent the item
to your buyer. Complying with PayPal's Seller Protection and following
the trading guidelines on our Security page helps to protect you from
things like chargebacks. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Buyer: Person Person person@example.com Confirmed delivery address
Person Person 5 Street Name Bedford, Bedfordshire Mk41 8NX United Kingdom
Inkfarm.com/font_coverage.php is a good compilation of ink coverage by font, with slightly different results to the few tests on fonts for ink usage and printer running costs that I've done at the bottom of this page. This is useful stuff to know if your'e interested in printer running costs. Other tests from Printer.com or Which Magazine seem to contradict as well - it's not just mine and inkfarm's that are different. I've copied inkfarm's results order or lightness, then in alphabetical order, getting figures from their source code. So far as I can see, they have taken a set of fonts from their operating system and tried to add which font exactly is being used so they've added descriptions like EF, ITC, MT, FB, or LT.
For some of the fonts I have got around to linking with a site that shows a large preview - AZfonts - or a wikipedia entry or even the company that produced the font.
13.1100 Action
13.1100 Action
2.2600 ADONIS
12.7300 Adrian
12.3100 Adriana
4.8400 AE
5.4600 Agency FB
8.4100 Akeem
10.9700 Algerian
8.1000 Arial
12.6500 Arial (Bold Italics)
12.9900 Arial (Bolded)
8.4700 Arial (Italics)
16.5700 Arial Black
6.6200 Arial Narrow
11.7000 Arial Rounded MT Bold
8.4800 Arial Unicode MS
8.1800 AvantGarde
11.3700 Baily
7.0900 BalloonEFDropShadow
15.5300 BalloonEFExtraBold
5.0700 Baskerville Old Face
13.2700 Bauhaus 93
4.7300 BEll MT
2.9200 Benjamin
9.0300 Berlin Sans FB
12.9200 Berlin Sans FB Demi
14.0600 Bernard MT Condensed
1.3800 BernhardEFFashion
3.0200 Betsy
9.7700 Billy
9.1800 Bitstream Vera Sans
9.2000 Bitstream Vera Sans Mono
8.9100 Bitstream Vera Serif
3.9100 Blackadder ITC
5.3400 Blair
13.2700 BlippoBlackEF
5.6300 Bodoni MT
12.4500 Bodoni MT Black
6.0400 Bodoni MT Compressed
4.5000 Bodoni MT Condenced
7.0500 BodoniEF
5.1200 Bonnie
6.5600 Book Antiqua
7.6700 Bookman
7.6700 Bookman Old Style
8.5400 Braddon
3.0200 Bradley Hand ITC
6.9300 Bria
2.4100 Brinkley
11.9900 Britannic Bold
12.0700 BritannicEFBold
4.0000 BritannicEFExtraLight
8.3700 BritannicEFMedium
15.1100 BritannicEFUltra
15.2600 Broadway
5.8800 Brody
4.8900 Bruce
5.2700 Brush Script MT
13.1700 Bump
6.5500 Calibri
2.2600 Calibri (Body)
5.2000 Californian FB
6.6700 Calisto MT
7.8400 Calvin
10.3000 Cambell
6.6400 Cambria
6.6400 Cambria Math
6.7800 Candara
4.3300 Cassandra
7.5600 Castellar
5.7600 Celeste
6.8800 Century
8.1800 Century Gothic
12.9000 Century Gothic (Bold Italics)
12.9500 Century Gothic (Bolded)
7.9200 Century Gothic (Italics)
7.8400 Century Schoolbook
11.9500 Century Schoolbook (Bold Italics)
12.4700 Century Schoolbook (Bolded)
7.1000 Century Schoolbook (Italics)
6.3200 Chantal
2.8700 Charlee
3.0700 Chiller
8.7700 Chinaone
4.0800 Chong
11.4100 Cityscape
6.3800 Clarence
6.1100 Classic
11.5100 Clever
9.6900 Clowningway
4.7400 Cody
4.3600 Colonna MT
9.1200 Comic Sans MS
7.7200 Consolas
7.0300 Constantia
15.5200 Cooper Black
12.6600 Copperplate Gothic Bold
7.1400 Copperplate Gothic Light
6.6000 Corbel
16.8000 Counter
4.4300 Courier
4.4300 Courier New
12.8300 Crash
12.8300 Crash
4.0900 Dakota
6.4400 Dana
6.5300 Danny
6.3100 Darnell
8.3900 David
9.4000 Delaney
10.4300 Denise
17.3900 Design
11.2500 Desiree
14.8400 Destine
2.4500 Devon
4.9600 Diane
7.4800 Ecofont Vera Sans
2.4700 Edwardian Script ITC
11.7900 Elegance
11.7900 Elegance
12.3000 Elephant
2.8000 EnglishScriptEF
13.3600 Engravers MT
14.9600 Eras Bold ITC
10.8200 Eras Demi ITC
3.2600 Eras Light ITC
6.9900 Eras Medium ITC
8.1000 Estrangelo Edessa
4.0100 Felix
7.5400 Felix Titling
2.7700 Feliz
2.7700 Feliz
8.1900 Feltpoint
7.9800 FirstHome
3.8100 FlairRoman
8.7900 Flippant
10.0400 FontFever
5.7300 Footlight MT Light
11.0800 Forte
6.9000 Franklin Gothic Book
11.3900 Franklin Gothic Demi
10.2700 Franklin Gothic Demi Cond
14.6100 Franklin Gothic Heavy
9.2000 Franklin Gothic Medium
8.2200 Franklin Gothic Medium Cond
3.2000 Freestyle Script
2.6500 French Script MT
7.2500 Futura Bk
11.5600 Futura Hv
3.9400 Futura Lt
8.0300 Futura Md
4.4000 Garamond
8.6300 Gatlinggun
8.1000 Gautami
14.2900 Genuine
7.6600 Georgia
4.6700 Gigi
7.2500 Gill Sans MT
5.3100 Gill Sans MT Condensed
7.5300 Gill Sans MT Ext Condensed Bold
23.6700 Gill Sans Ultra Bold
16.0600 Gill Sans Ultra Bold Condensed
6.6200 Gloucester MT Extra Condensed
4.5300 Goudy Old Style
21.3600 Goudy Stout
10.3500 Griffen
11.2200 Haettenscweiler
7.0500 Hana
8.9900 Harlow Solid Italic
5.2600 Harrington
8.1000 Helvetica
12.6500 Helvetica (Bold Italics)
12.9900 Helvetica (Bolded)
8.4700 Helvetica (Italics)
6.6200 Helvetica Condensed
6.6200 Helvetica-Narrow
7.0400 Herman
5.5600 High Tower Text
1.2500 HighEmotions
2.6800 Huntson
17.6100 Impact
5.7700 Imprint MT Shadow
3.8700 Informal Roman
5.2900 Iris
8.0400 Jackie
16.7800 James
10.4200 Jokerman
12.9800 Josie
3.8800 Juice ITC
14.8300 Junior
8.8100 JustStew
3.2000 Kartika
4.1100 Kendric
18.3400 Killian
3.2500 KingsFont
10.3500 Kristen ITC
1.5900 Kunstler Script
8.1000 Latha
10.4300 Lincoln
5.1300 LineaEF
12.6100 LivingWell
8.1600 Lucida Bright
8.4700 Lucida Calligraphy
8.9800 Lucida Console
8.7800 Lucida Fax
10.7000 Lucida Handwriting
8.5200 Lucida Sans
9.0000 Lucida Sans Typewriter
8.5200 Lucida Sans Unicode
2.1700 Luke
5.8900 Lynn
4.1700 Macbeth
11.3900 Magneto
6.8900 Maiandra GD
8.1000 Mangal
12.1900 Mario
18.9600 MarketPro
10.1700 Matura MT Script Capitals
3.1700 Maxell
3.3100 Maximo
2.9700 MeltedText
9.2000 Micheal
8.4900 Microsoft Sans Serif
2.4200 Miles
5.1500 Mistral
5.7100 Modern No. 20
8.3400 ModernArt
5.9900 Mohammed
3.2900 Monotype Corsiva
4.3900 MS Mincho
9.2800 MS Reference Sans Serif
8.1000 MV Boli
7.8400 NewCenturySchlbk
4.0500 Niagara Engraved
5.7300 Niagara Solid
7.6200 OCR A Extend
9.4600 OCR B MT
7.6200 OCR-A II
7.3200 Old English Text MT
5.2900 OliveOil
6.0400 Onyx
9.0500 OpenClassic
3.3800 PaintStroke
1.3400 Palace Script MT
6.5600 Palatino
6.5600 Palitino Linotype
4.1500 Papyrus
1.7900 Parchment
9.8300 PeopleStype
3.9600 Perpetua Wiki
7.7500 Perpetua Titling MT
9.8600 PlakataEFBoldCondensed
7.6100 PlakataEFExtraCondensed
6.2300 PlayBill
5.2000 Poor Richard Identifont
12.0500 PostBoy
4.5200 Pristina
6.8100 QuickType
5.8900 QuickType Condensed
6.8100 QuickType II
5.8900 QuickType II Condensed
7.1800 QuickType II Mono
7.1800 QuickType Mono
8.1000 Raavi
4.5100 Rage Italic
22.6400 Ravie
8.1200 RealVirtue
6.4900 ReturnToEarth
8.5600 RoaringFire
9.1600 Rockwell
7.6600 Rockwell Condensed
18.5600 Rockwell Extra Bold
2.9300 Sabina
8.0100 Script MT Bold
7.1600 Segoe UI
25.8400 Showcard Gothic
8.1000 Shruti
4.4400 SmallRose
17.9100 Snap ITC
4.4900 SnowWrite
17.0400 Stencil
4.3200 Stern
11.9100 Sublime
6.4600 Sylfaen
8.9800 Tahoma
4.5700 Tempus Sans ITC
5.8200 Times
8.1500 Times (Bold Italics)
9.0600 Times (Bolded)
5.4000 Times (Italics)
5.8200 Times New Roman
5.6000 Tracy
8.4100 Trebuchet MS
8.1000 Tunga
6.1400 Tw Cen MT
5.1700 Tw Cen MT Condensed
9.9300 Tw Cen MT Condensed Extra Bold
9.2800 Verdana
15.8200 Verdana (Bold Italics)
15.8600 Verdana (Bolded)
9.0500 Verdana (Italics)
14.8100 VerticalSmudge
7.6500 Viner Hand ITC
3.4700 Vivaldi
3.1300 Vladimir Script
4.0200 Vrinda
6.3000 WalbaumFrakturEF
4.1100 WhiteWater
21.4200 Wide Latin
9.0500 Wired
2.6000 WishingType
3.2900 ZapfChancery
Printer running cost tests of different fonts for ink coverage
These tests are separate from inkfarm and just a dabble from AZfonts previews, accessed as urls to an online photo converter, downloaded as jpegs with 100% quality, then uploaded to http://lab.dejaworks.com/dev/inc-toner-consumption-calculator/,
The choice of text could make a couple of percentage points difference, with Univers above Calibri for the first text sample but below Calibri for the standard Lorem Ipsum text sample.
Re-loading a sample of Helios Light that had been on the blog showed an increased ink coverage from 6.82 to 9.77 for unknown reasons.
It should be possible to skip a stage: save as .png and upload to dejaworks, but the background counted as black instead of transparent so it didn't work. It should also be possible to upload from azfonts straight to the editor, but a randomised default text uploads instead of the selected one. 06.75 Roman Hollow FZ
Firms like Epson test their printer costs on international standard test pages. I discover this from Computer World's "how we test" page, which is one of the printer running cost test sites listed on this page from Island Inkjet. The trouble is that these calculations build-in the cost of the cartridge, rather than telling you a figure in milliliters of ink. If you're interested in price, you'll buy cheaper cartridges, or bottled ink and a pipe for a continuous inkjet supply system and you won't be so interested in how many gills in a quart make a bellyfull or whatever measurement system exists in the USA. The tests use default settings as well.
A site called The Ink Factory quotes some test results of Epson's tests for colour printers, and quoted the coverage of black ink at 240 test pages per 5.1ml cartridge or 0.02125 ml of ink per page. Tests are done without cleaning cycles. Cleaning cycles are the things that flush as much ink as possible down the loo for no reason. Printer drivers also tend to revert to their default settings unless you adjust them from the printer default part of your operating system. When adjusting, there are puzzing bits. Hewlett Packard explain their "ret" option here for example.
There are some images of ISO printer test documents here. Ink Factory gives instructions for finding other test documents that come with your operating system such as Windows. Or you can pay ISO £75 to find out the precise wording of a test document or get an original copy to use.
An example of a big print job is for someone who wants to stand for the UK parliament in a constituency of 100,000 people, which is (?) one pallet of paper and anyway costs about £500 at 0.5p per A4 sheet. 50,000 letterboxes is common. Sending each constituent an ISO test document with 5% ink coverage could use 2.125 litres of ink, which isn't bad - possibly £106.25 or a fifth the price of the paper. I don't know if any political researcher has tried using free postage for candidates to send an ISO test document and counted the votes, but there would be a few votes cast by mistake or to encourage the underdog or in exasperation at the main candidates. A candidate like this got 84 votes where I live at the last election - between one or two pounds per vote in ink. There is more about UK elections in Richmond Park constituency here.
The Inkfactory site suggests looking-up product brochures for your printer to see test results, and has a printer manual search box on their page to help you track the thing down.
540 pages text (ISO/IEC 10561 standard business letter pattern);
378 pages graphic (? 5% coverage)
...is what my old printer's brochure suggested for the orginal cartridge's 13ml of ink (note how newer cartridges are less than half the size) so 2.407 litres for the constituency. There's also the cost of wearing out the printer, which doesn't look as though it could do 100,000 sheets even with a coffee break. It was free on Trashnothing.com / freecycle but cost a lot of time and patience as well as a bit of travel.
The next problem is how to get maximum readability for this 5% or X%, which is just a short business letter with some graphics in the international standard. One of the other posts in this blog quotes Gerard Unger, who has tought graphics and font design at a college as well as designing one or two fonts. He claims that Adobe Font Manager Pro had tested the ink coverage of his Gulliver typeface. It turns out that there other ink coverage meters with free trials, and free ones that calculate from .tiff .jpeg and some .png images of pages, so it could be possible to cost a printing job without spending any money.
http://lab.dejaworks.com/dev/inc-toner-consumption-calculator for .jpg files, and .png without a transparent background, so not the .png files used for type display.
Dejaworks measured the candidate leaflet above @ 14.1% black for A5. The "strong local champion" A4 letter in the same Richmond on Thames constituency from electionleaflets.org uses 10½% black, 5½% each of colours except for blue which only gets one and three quarter percent. "No canvassing without a manifesto, please" is over 5%, "straight talking" is over 45% ink on one side and over 95% on the other side.
Somone on a web forum wrote "To calculate this I open the document in Photoshop (CMYK, no colour management), flatten it and apply the average blur tool, then it's just a matter of seeing the CMYK percentages.".I quote that in full to save trying to understand what it means. I hope that Gimp and Getpaint.net have this function as well as the free-ish Photoshop CS2
Commercial printers might use one of the pre-flight features in upmarket software or standalone. There's a discussion about them here http://www.prepressure.com/design/basics/tic
Priprinter.com - a bundle of pre-press features including cost estimation, ink saving by printing thinner, deleting unwanted pages, changing margins, and saving to pdf instead of printing. Free with an acknowledgement printed on each page, or paid-for with options from $25 to $95. The program is from Pelikan Software of Hungary. http://www.priprinter.com/features.htm
Scribus, the open source desk-top publishing program, is aimed at people who use preflight tests and the default menu has some. I don't know how to find details or adapt the program to get ink coverage onto the menu. Krita for Linux and Inkscape for vector graphics are other open source programs for the print trade.
