New Font Uses Holes To Cut Ink Use

An anonymous reader writes "A Dutch company has taken an open source Sans Serif font and added holes to it to try and save on printer ink costs. The Ecofont is claimed to save up to 20 percent of ink costs, but it allegedly took the firm a while to perfect the ratio of the maximum number of holes possible without sacrificing readability."

This is pointless

[toby]

These people don't seem aware that typefaces are usually available in many weights.

You can save much more than this by simply changing to a lighter weight. [fontshop.com]

(I am a typographer. But it shouldn't take one to figure this out.)

Re:Not just for saving ink

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't it actually be using MORE electrons to display all those nice glowy white spaces?

Horrible on screen

[Fëanáro]

Looks absolutely horrible on screen, fuzzy and irregular letters at lower font sizes.

And at bigger sizes the holes themselves start to look jagged.

does that improve in print?

Re:Horrible on screen

[Galaga88]

I printed off a quick test to an HP LaserJet 4100 from Word 2007 in WinXP, and it looks a lot better in print than on screen. 10 & 11 point being where it looks best. You can still see the holes, but they're not as glaringly obvious or jagged as when displayed on screen.

Re:What a fucking stupid idea!

[D Ninja]

Yes. I love the "paperless" route. I wish I never saw a piece of "real" mail (other than computer parts) or anything else like that in my entire life. It's such a waste of time, landfill space, the killing of trees, etc, etc, etc. Paper is not a necessity except in a few (and becoming fewer) cases.

Now, of course, try convincing people who haven't worked on a computer their whole life of that fact.

Re:What a fucking stupid idea!

[Firehed]

Paper trees are always re-planted after being cut down (it would get unsustainable very quickly if this didn't happen) - and generally also have a lot of recycled material in the final product. The tree-cutting damage comes from the food industry clearing the way for beef cows or corn crops.

Never mind how insanely expensive ink is. The wasted ink is by far worse than the wasted paper. If you want to save a few sheets, shrink your print margins; either way, there's really no net gain or loss in trees.

Re:What a fucking stupid idea!

[Anonymous Coward]

Most paper is made from tree farms or recycled paper, so you're not really wasting any trees. At least that's the case in the United States.

Re:What a fucking stupid idea!

[LingNoi]

Well since the paper comes from tree farms and the trees are replanted like vegetables are my guess is the Ink.

I also makes a good way to suck carbon out of the atmosphere. Tree eats CO2, tree becomes paper, paper becomes buried at landfill.

It's much better then recycling paper where it has to be taken to the recycling plant to be sorted, then taken to a factory to wash the ink off using toxic chemicals and then taken to the paper factory to be used in new paper.

Re:What a fucking stupid idea!

[York the Mysterious]

Coming from a University that bought 10 pallets a year of paper and a truck load of toner, it's a big cost. Switching fonts to save 20% would be a very nice savings.

Typophile.com

[PancakeMan]

Typographers' discussion here: http://typophile.com/node/52616 [typophile.com]

Re:This is pointless

[Whiteox]

Sans Serif mean that there are no feet at the bottom of letters.
Serif means that there are feet at the bottom of letters.
Arial is sans serif
Times is serif.

Serifs are easier to read on paper as the eye can follow the font easier due to the visual definition of each letter and the apparent line along the base of words.

FYI: sans (FR)=without

Re:This is pointless

[SocialEngineer]

It used to be argued that serif fonts were more readable than sans in print, but recent studies have shown that it likely isn't the case. Things like x-height, width, weight, letter spacing, etc have more bearing than serif or not. (I work at a newspaper that still has a print following, and also do independent design).

Re:I agree many things don't need to be printed

[EventHorizon_pc]

12 point font means the font's vertical size is 12/72in = 1/6th of an inch.

Keeping a constant aspect ratio, the ink savings would be (12*12-10*10)/12*12 = 30.56%

For 20%, sqrt(.8)*12 = 10.73pt font. He was underestimating! ... and yet, no one cares....

Re:What a fucking stupid idea!

[LunarCrisis]

Whoever modded that "troll" should read this [wikipedia.org].

Re:What a fucking stupid idea!

[mosb1000]

Deforestation is almost exclusively the result of agricultural expansion. It makes no sense to say that saving paper = saving forests.

Here is what Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] has to say about the matter:

In simple terms deforestation occurs because forested land is not economically viable. Increasing the amount of farmland, wood extraction and, infrastructure expansion are all important factors in driving deforestation in different regions with mining also an important cause. There is considerable interplay between these factors. For example logging(wood extraction) or mining requires roads to transport the timber(infrastructure expansion) and farmers use these roads to move into previously unreachable areas of forest (agricultural expansion). The ultimate cause of most deforestation is increased food production. Cattle, permanent crops, shifting cultivation and colonization are all equally important to global tropical deforestation

Even when deforestation is the result of lumber harvesting activities, it is primarily because the roads used to access the lumber make it easier for farmers to move in and use the land.

While forest area is on the decline in the US, it is due to urbanization, not timber harvesting activities (the same article discusses this).

Re:What a fucking stupid idea!

[afidel]

Just color copies/prints cost my midsized employer $200K last year and that didn't include the cost of paper. In this economy that's a real target for cost savings. If you can save 20% that's about enough to employ one low level person or enough to give an extra 1% cost of living adjustment to a department. As long as the results are legible on a marginal printer is there any reason NOT to do it?

Re:What a fucking stupid idea!

[afidel]

I've seen multiple presentations by naturalists specifically calling out the fact that North America is significantly more forested than it was before European settlers came. One big factor is the wholesale clearing of much of the great plains.

Re:What a fucking stupid idea!

[kimvette]

On that note, check out their license [ecofont.eu] page:

The inventive designing method of the Ecofont - ommitting spaces in each
letter to decrease the black surface of the letter and thus save ink by printing - is intellectual
property of SPRANQ creative communications, Utecht, The Netherlands. Imitation of this technique
is prohibited.

They pretty much fucked their own limitation over by releasing this under GPL (which they had to do, starting out with a GPL typeface to begin with). By releasing under the GPL they cannot place such restrictions on use, forking, renaming, imitating, etc. by definition. You can do what you want with this, so long as it remains GPL.

In summary: imitate at will, per the license they released this under.

On a completely unrelated note: since this is obviously just a "green" publicity stunt, where are the "donations" going?

Re:What a fucking stupid idea!

[AvitarX]

I probably wasn't clear, but the $90 (3000 pages at .03/page) was over 12 months of printing for the both of us (I probably printed under 150 pages though). This was not just the final prints, but every draft the was marked up and reviewed, sometimes 2 or 3 a night. I got this number by printing a total life-time page when the toner ran out after a year of ownership (probably a month into the second year of classes actually).

I know that expenses can be tight, but $10/month is a very minor cost of college, and even the most desperate of students can probably come up with it. If not then they are struggling so much every day that it will probably not be what puts them over the top.

As long as it is not coin-op where it needs to be paid at the moment I think it would be fine.

Besides, if printing went down 70% I bet it reduced the cost of computer lab fees (or kept them down) tacked onto tuition as a separate line item. In that sense everybody wins (financially), because the cost of printing supplies just went down for every student.

Students are often expected to purchase and turn-in workbooks that cost $15-$30, this a budget tech college, if students can be expected to spend $15 on a workbook they find out about after the fact, can't they be expected to pay $6 for a couple drafts of a 30 page report, and some other stuff?

Re:What a fucking stupid idea!

[reddburn]

That's fair, but only as long as professors are required to take every assignment in a digital form. The moment there's a class that requires a printed copy of a report, that printing better be included with the price for taking the class.

Under "Required Materials" on my syllabus, I always put "a few dollars for printing/copying."

Re:Why it works, and why other ways are better.

[foo12]

This is already done with flexo printing where you're working with ink coverage limitations and a stock and printing process that are prone to dot gain. Sometimes it's better to keep a .5pt solid holding rule and fill with a 98% screen with the understanding that 98% is going to gain up to 100%.

That said, ink cost on a press run is an almost negligible part of the equation. It's really not a cost savings on even a large press run.