New Font Uses Holes To Cut Ink Use 540
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."
Practicality? (Score:5, Interesting)
Looks interesting, but probably not very practical. Surely simply printing in draft mode and in grey-scale is an easier way? On screen this is probably going to be more headache than its worth.
This is the printer's job. (Score:4, Interesting)
The 'economy mode' on my rather old laser printer basically does this. It just sort of prints letter outlines instead of the full letter. Ecofont's solution seems like... leaky abstraction? The print-saving settings are now embedded into a document rather than determined at print time. Sounds like a terrible idea for a problem that's already been solved.
Re:This is the printer's job. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:This is pointless (Score:4, Interesting)
Shouldn't they have done this with a serif font if it is meant to save ink/toner?
Surely all the serifs would cancel out the saving from the holes?
Re:What a fucking stupid idea! (Score:2, Interesting)
Exactly. Which is worse, a few squirts of ink, or all the trees that are cut down so you can print out your inbox?
Re:This is pointless (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes but lighter weights either make the font thinner and harder to read, When it prints it uses a dithering option to get the lightness sometimes giving it a choppy edge to it. This font makes sure the edges are solid allowing you to more clearly read the font.
Re:I agree many things don't need to be printed (Score:2, Interesting)
That's assuming that a font size of 12 wasn't used for a reason (such as readability - I, myself, have trouble reading a font size of 10 due to an eyesight condition I have and before anyone says, no, glasses do not help) and the same reasoning can be applied to a font size of 10 - why not drop it down to 8? At least with this font, the idea is you don't have to change your font sizes or anything yet still be able to save a bit more ink. It's crude, but it could certainly be effective if used correctly.
Re:Here's another cleverly simple idea: cookies (Score:4, Interesting)
One Christmas I was at my Mom's house. She is a "low sodium" believer. She salts nothing at all, and has a shaker on the table for those who want some taste in their food. (She has also lost all sense of smell, which is a large component of food taste, so she doesn't notice the lack of salt at all. She's easy to buy for for Christmas presents; I go to Goodwill and get empty bottles of high-price perfume, fill them with isopropyl alcohol, and give them to her as the real stuff. She can't tell that it isn't.)
I went to refill the shaker. She had a box of "low sodium salt" on the shelf. "20% less sodium" it said. Wow. Perhaps this was a mix of table salt and potassium chloride?
It looked different. Table salt is usually sold in the cubic crystal form. Tiny cubes, just the way that salt will crystalize out of a concentrated solution of brine, which is part of the salt making process. This stuff was powdery.
I looked closer at the label. Contents: sodium chloride and iodine. Typical table salt.
To make a long story short, I realized that this company had done something to "fluff up" the normal salt crystals to make them larger and put only 13 ounces (by weight) of product in a box that normally contains 16. A "teaspoon" of this product actually contained 20% less sodium than "normal" salt, simply because it contained 20% less product by weight.
I considered that to be false advertising, but technically, the box did contain 20% less sodium than normal table salt boxes of the same size, and by volume, it was 20% less.
Re:Horrible on screen (Score:3, Interesting)
The following isn't a criticism of just this font, but of almost every "modern" font. This just happens to be a particularly notable example.
It seems to be in vogue these days to ignore the hints needed for limited screen resolution, particularly with antialiasing turned off. Try this experiment: if you're on Windows, turn off ClearType. Compare the horrible screen display of this font with the carefully thought out bit-mapped screen fonts of Arial.
It takes time to do it right, and I guess in this hurried modern world there just isn't time for craftsmanship anymore.
Most designers also probably assume that everyone has antialiasing turned on. I don't, because it makes things look fuzzy, sometimes with vague rainbows bleeding out of the edges. I know I'm in a minority, but still I don't think that I'm the only one who prefers the crispness of a carefully designed bit-mapped font. Off and on I've tried to get used to antialiasing, but in the end I go back. (ClearType also makes the period and comma almost indistinguishable in the 8pt Andale Mono I prefer for text editing.) Since I can usually select old-fashioned fonts with excellent bitmaps, it rarely is a problem, except that there doesn't seem to be any font with good bitmaps for Unicode math symbols.
Re:This is pointless (Score:5, Interesting)
Newspapers are ususally more concerned with legibility than readability: how much can we pack on a page and still have the reader make it out at all, not how fatigued the reader is after reading hundreds of pages. Maybe you're an exception, but on the whole newpaper fonts tend to be different from book fonts in just that optimization choice.
If you have studies that show you can pack text as densely on the page with sans-serif fonts as serif, I'd believe that. The legibility advantage of serif fonts was largely in the redundancy provided in case part of a letter broke off in the press - hardly a concern with modern equipment.
But for reading a book's worth of text, serif fonts win hands down. I *hate* technical books where some asshole thought it would be clever to use a sans-serif font to show how technical the book was - as I grow older, this sort of thing causes me physical pain. The changing of the default Word font from serif to sans will be a source of annoyance for years to come, and no doubt cause me to toss that many more resumes on the "ow, my eyes!" pile.
Re:This is pointless (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I agree many things don't need to be printed (Score:3, Interesting)
Wouldn't you have to account for the saved horizontal space also, seeing as how more words would fit on a line?
Yay needless specificity!
Re:Here's another cleverly simple idea: cookies (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Practicality? (Score:3, Interesting)
>> someone who considers a 9pt font shamelessly wasteful for anything but a presentation-quality final result.
Maybe using a bit bigger font size will save in your future ophthalmologist bills.
Re:What a fucking stupid idea! (Score:3, Interesting)
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).
Actually, Bitstream Vera isn't GPL and has no copy-left clauses. [gnome.org]
The clause that you pointed out in Spranq's license is rather questionable, though. It makes it sound like they own a design patent on the font. That would also allow them to control derivative works, even if Bistream Vera was released under the GPL (v.2 or earlier).
I couldn't find anything that supported the patent theory, though. If it's true, that would certainly sour their slashvertisement. If it's false, then I'm pretty sure their patent is unenforceable, since you don't actually need to use the font to emulate its design.
Re:Practicality? (Score:3, Interesting)
That was true for most CRTs, as the natural color of the screen is black, and it takes extra energy to generate the light to make it a brighter color. Therefore having most pixels be dark saves energy
However, most LCD's behave the exact opposite. LCDs have a backlight, so their natural color is white. It takes energy to make the liquid crystal block out some or all of that backlight, so the more white pixels you have, the more energy you save.
Re:This is pointless (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Practicality? (Score:3, Interesting)
Ah touche, I apparently don't know much about printers :)
In that case, the holes are too small for me to see. Either way, the effect comes off well.
Re:This is pointless (Score:3, Interesting)
Hence the difference between "screen font" and "print font". Sans-serif are easier to read at low resolution because the letters are less complex (which is also why they are used in headlines and signs), while serifs make it easier to track a line in long, closely spaced text like a book.
Re:Practicality? (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, but LED backlighting changes that equation yet again
So will OLED displays, once they take over the market in [5, 10, 20, 50] years.
Yes, in fact, a high-enough resolution LED backlight can theoretically add extra contrast to a display, while reducing power consumption [digitalhom...gnline.com]. Of particular interest is producing colored backlighting to match the picture using the RGB LED arrays.
Sure, current LED arrays have problems with lighting uniformity, but from experience, I can say the exact same thing of early flourescent backlighting (late 90s). It's only a matter of time before we can toss the inefficient flourescent backlighting of current LCDs, and move-on to something much better.