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.
Re:Practicality? (Score:5, Funny)
I'm waiting for the serif version of that font; there they'll replace the serifs with spoilers. I also think they will add a special Type-R sticker glyph in a Unicode Private Use Area to make it go even faster. Then the only thing that could possibly beat the font would be drift typing - but everyone knows that technique can be handled only by the most extreme Japanese fonts.
Woohoo! (Score:5, Funny)
Save both ink AND paper... (Score:3, Funny)
A bt f cre8v splng cn sv bth ink & papr. Thez 2 sntncs hv svd 31% f bth.
Re:Practicality? (Score:4, Insightful)
No, looks like complete and utter crap.
And I say that as someone who encourages people to print in the most severe toner-saving mode their printer has; as someone who duplexes everything, often 4-up per side; someone who considers a 9pt font shamelessly wasteful for anything but a presentation-quality final result.
I also say it as someone who doesn't get all elitist about fonts (I happen to like Comic Sans, ThankYouVeryMuch), as long as they don't hurt to read.
And Spranq Eco Sans hurts to read. At large sizes, it looks like a billboard with all the lights out, and at small sizes it looks like someone ran it through the shredder and taped it back together. Just way too visually distracting to even consider.
Re: (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:Practicality? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ahhh... so, bonus points for @media print{body{font-family:Spranq Eco Sans;}}?
Re:Inkjet business = New Microsoft monopoly (Score:4, Insightful)
Guess what: EVERYTHING you buy costs a fraction of its price to manufacture. If you don't like the price of inkjet printer cartridges, you are free to not buy inkjet printers. Printer manufacturers have found that people prefer buying cheap printers to buying expensive printers with cheap cartridges.
If you don't like the price of inkjet cartridges, you are more than welcome to buy laser printers, all of which are far cheaper to operate than inkjets. You can buy a laser printer for 50 bucks these days. Just stop whining and demanding government handouts, it's getting a little out of hand.
Re:Practicality? (Score:4, Insightful)
This is pointless (Score:5, Informative)
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.)
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:This is pointless (Score:5, Insightful)
Yea, Light is so last century. It's all about the Eco now.
Re:This is pointless (Score:4, Funny)
So "green" is the new "pink" and "eco" is the new "black"? Or is "black" the new "light"? I'm so confused.
Re:This is pointless (Score:5, Funny)
So "green" is the new "pink" and "eco" is the new "black"? Or is "black" the new "light"? I'm so confused.
You are so dead at the next zebra crossing.
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: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:This is pointless (Score:5, Insightful)
What I meant is, they seem to have modified a screen font. If you are trying to save toner/ink, I would think that choosing a printed font would be more effective.
I know that you CAN print a sans-serif font, but I thought that the rule of thumb was that serif fonts should be used for print.
That said, I have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about - thus why I asked the question :)
Re:This is pointless (Score:5, Funny)
That said, I have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about
Don't worry, it doesn't show.
Mod parent down! (Score:5, Funny)
Really, guys. I'm not that funny.
Re:Mod parent down! (Score:5, Funny)
Ironically, it was, then somebody modded it down.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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 (Score:4, Informative)
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:5, Funny)
Shouldn't they have done this with a serif font if it is meant to save ink/toner?
They started with a serif font. What's left is sans serif.
Horrible (Score:5, Insightful)
At big sizes the holes make it look horrible. At small sizes it's not all that readable as far as fonts go.
You might as well print at 80% grey instead of black to get the same savings and have it look better.
Re:Horrible (Score:5, Insightful)
From the website:
View the Ecofont
In the picture you can see how the Ecofont is created by omitting parts of the letter. At the shown size, this obviously is not very nice, but at a regular font size it is actually very usable.
It must look pretty horrible at smaller sizes too otherwise I think they might have shown us a sample, no?
If they'd constructed it out of Sierpinski gasket they would have saved a lot more!
Nice bit of viral marketing for Spranq methinks.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not supposed to look good on screen. It is to save ink when printing.
Unfortunately (Score:5, Funny)
I'm willing to make that sacrifice if it means saving Mother Earth!
Not just for saving ink (Score:5, Funny)
Just imagine how many electrons could be saved if people used this font in their browser.
Re:Not just for saving ink (Score:5, Funny)
Just imagine how many electrons could be saved if people used this font in their browser.
I always recycle my electrons.
Re:Not just for saving ink (Score:5, Funny)
On an LCD, you should use a dark theme in the winter so that the dark pixels soak up the extra backlight photons and convert them into heat. In the summer, go with a lighter theme that will let all of the photons out before they have a chance to run up your AC bill. Oh, and make sure you set the monitor up near a window so the extra photons can just keep right on going.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
They have monitors that have white? Mine is only green text on a black background.
Re:Not just for saving ink (Score:5, Funny)
You got green? Mine is black text on a black background. I have to guess what everybody is saying.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
The horrible part comes when you do a screen print and forget to swap the colors, thus negating all that money you were saving on toner.
Re:Not just for saving ink (Score:5, Funny)
Bonus tip: if you put everything in quote tags, it saves on black electrons.
Re:Not just for saving ink (Score:4, Funny)
meh, BLINK tag save FIFTY PERCENT of the electrons !
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)
Holy Illegible Font, Batman! (Score:3, Funny)
You know you were thinking it.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
But how much e-ink (Score:5, Funny)
will it save while I view documents on my ereader?
The obligatory line: (Score:3, Funny)
Horrible on screen (Score:4, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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: (Score:3, Funny)
But how much ink got wasted by everybody on /. firing up their laser printers?
Re: (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
Dot Matrix Draft (Score:5, Funny)
I prefer to use Inverted Ecofont, in which everything else is removed and only the holes remain. This saves 80% of the ink, and it known to some people as "dot-matrix draft mode".
This is new font is stupid and not news.
Dutch? Really? (Score:4, Funny)
I would've expected such an idea to come from Switzerland.
Coming soon... (Score:5, Funny)
The eco-boat.
A day in the font (Score:5, Funny)
I read Slashdot today, oh boy
Four thousand holes in ecofont sans serif
And though the holes were very small
They had to count them all
Now they know how many holes it takes to fill "the Albert Hall"
I'd love to turn you on
Why it works, and why other ways are better. (Score:4, Insightful)
It works via dot gain (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot_gain), where ink tends to spread on paper. This happens with both inkjet and offset presses.
This would be much better implemented as part of the pre-press process of the publisher. The publisher could select all headlines, and apply a "holes" pattern much more specific to their press and their ink levels.
They're a marcomms company: this is a stunt (Score:5, Insightful)
Sigh. As the various outraged typographers here attest, this is a self-promotional stunt and has nothing to do with innovation or even typography. The clue is the first line of TFA:
"Dutch marketing and communications company Spranq has come up with a novel and free way of slashing printer ink costs by developing a font with holes in it."
I work for a marcomms agency as well. This is how such agencies get clients: you pull stunts like this to make yourselves look like gurus in some way, so when you go in for pitches you have lots of press clippings (clients don't read them, they just look at where they were published) so you have some kind of differentiation over your rivals. I worked for a place where we made a big fanfare about recruiting an "artist in residence" (and got lots of press) - others in our space have launched "labs" or various kinds, etc. etc.
There's no substance in any of it. It's all just a marketing con-job and sad to say Slashdot has fallen for it (not that a marcomms agency's clients would be interested in a /. story anyway).
Ah, the irony (Score:3, Insightful)
Clearly this is one of those "let's-get-some-free-press" stories. How much extra ink will be used printing this story on page D-5 of every local newspaper's wacky news section?
As a former type designer (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What a fucking stupid idea! (Score:4, Insightful)
Tell you what, when you can come up with a better way to save 20% of the ink used on a printed document, then you can say it's stupid. Until then, I think it's a cleverly simple idea.
Re:What a fucking stupid idea! (Score:5, Insightful)
I have a way to save 100%. Don't print it!
I agree many things don't need to be printed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I agree many things don't need to be printed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I agree many things don't need to be printed (Score:5, Informative)
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: (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:I agree many things don't need to be printed (Score:5, Funny)
Or modify English spellings to conform with those used by 13 y/ olds in their text messages.
u cn save ink n papr 2 !
Re:I agree many things don't need to be printed (Score:4, Funny)
aawwwwwwwwwww datz riily riily smart!!!!!!!!!!!!"##
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
u cn save ink n papr 2 !
What?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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: (Score:3, Insightful)
Most paper will be readable in 30 years. Will your digital documents?
Microsoft Word dropped support for old document formats fairly recently, so even if you've still got a medium which is readable (cdroms in 30 years? Probably not...) you've got to worry about the file format.
Re:What a fucking stupid idea! (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know for you but for me 99.9% of the paper I consumed won't be readable in a year, because I will have thrown it away.
Text-files? I'm sure they will.
PDF? No idea.
Re:What a fucking stupid idea! (Score:5, Funny)
Since there are printing costs overruns, I suggested we should charge people by the number of pages not picked up at the end of the month. My suggestion was quickly shot down. I'll never make it into management.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
As far as a company is concerned - the ink is a bigger problem. It costs a whole lot more.
Re:What a fucking stupid idea! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What a fucking stupid idea! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What a fucking stupid idea! (Score:5, Insightful)
First of all, the idea that everything required for the class should be included in the price of the class is ridiculous. Books aren't included. Neither are pens, paper, or laptops.
Second, what difference does it make whether you pay for your printing at the printer or in your tuition? Theoretically speaking, if nobody abused their printing privileges, the cost would average out and the cost to you would be the same either way.
However, if charging three cents at the printer reduces abuse, then you, as a student, actually save money. Even if you're one of the students that's abusing your printing privileges, you'd still save money because you don't have to pay for all the other students that are abusing their privileges. Putting all the cost in the tuition causes the tragedy of the commons. [wikipedia.org]
My college actually charged nine cents per page; it was really no big deal. Although I'm curious if the GP meant three cents per page, or three cents per job. If it's per page, the 70% drop doesn't surprise me too much, but if it's per job, then that's pretty amazing.
Re:What a fucking stupid idea! (Score:5, Funny)
Your ideas intrigue me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Unfortunately, since you don't take ink seriously, I'm guessing you are spending too much printing your newsletter and will be out of business shortly.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Save the Earth!
Cut holes in the 20% of heads of Oil Company Executives, Bankers and Presidents!
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Even evaluating different brightness values of the paper you buy will i
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You know, everyone gets all up in arms about using paper. Do none of you realize that paper [wikipedia.org] is a renewable resource [wikipedia.org]?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yah. It's renewable. But we're using it at a faster pace than it can be renewed. Wood fibre in general... it's not *just* paper that's causing problems, mind you... the construction industry is using an awful lot of wood, too. But we *do* need to reduce our consumption of wood, and it's a lot easier to reduce the amount of paper you consume than it is the amount of wood the housing industry consumes. Every little bit helps.
Re:What a fucking stupid idea! (Score:5, Informative)
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:
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! (Score:5, Insightful)
Mod parent interesting, insightful, and informative.
It seems counter-intuitive, but if we stopped using wood completely, then forested land would no longer be profitable! If that happened, people would just replace the forested land with something that is profitable, like housing developments or farms.
I agree that deforestation is a big problem, particularly in third-world countries, but reducing paper use could reduce reforestation, which would cause more harm than good.
I think it's more important that we focus on passing laws to protect natural habitats; when forced to, logging companies have no problems making the most with the land they own.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What a fucking stupid idea! (Score:5, Informative)
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: (Score:3, Informative)
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: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I'm going to make the cookies tonight. I'll let everybody know.
Re:What a fucking stupid idea! (Score:5, Funny)
ask me how!
Re:What a fucking stupid idea! (Score:4, Funny)
f u cn rd ths u cn sv on prntg cst...
How... Wow... Did you learn that in SMS-class? I have a better idea however. It seems that only the upper half of the letter is necessary for reading. That would save 50%!
Re:What a fucking stupid idea! (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What a fucking stupid idea! (Score:5, Funny)
f u cn rd ths u cn
I blushed when I read this: "fxxx xxu cxnx, rxdx thxs xxu cxnx"
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I just installed this to have a look at it. Didn't appear in OpenOffice. OK, guess I did something wrong. Fiddled about, removed, reinstalled, regenerated font-cache.
Nope.
Checked another applicaion...nope no 'Ecofont'
*30 infuriating minutes later*
THE FONT NAME IS 'SPRANQ ECOFONT'? Dear holy frak that took me ages to find. Who the hell prefixes their goddamn font with a company name. No one. God that pissed me off. MOTHERFUCKING *VENTING* GRRRRR.
Nice font though.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, as people have pointed out before, this is just a lame marketing trick from an unknown ad company, since you can just use any thinner font and get the same readability with even less ink.
For the marketing trick to work, of course they need to spam their name.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
On that note, check out their license [ecofont.eu] page:
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
Re:What a fucking stupid idea! (Score:5, Insightful)
I have a much better one, change the quality settings in the printing dialog. There you have it ..
I doubt it will be less readable than that crap and it will also work for all fonts and images and so on ..
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Here's another cleverly simple idea: cookies (Score:5, Funny)
Poke holes in the cookies before serving. The cookies are now 20% healthier!
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:Here's another cleverly simple idea: cookies (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:What a fucking stupid idea! (Score:5, Funny)
I agree. Their idea is redundant as most letters come pre-made with holes in them.
Re:gray color (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah, but it uses up all your gray ink.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I print on the finest amazon rainforest paper, with several layers of black ink, and then dust the wet ink with ground up dark-roasted panda bones.