, 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.
