Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
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.
(I am a typographer. But it shouldn't take one to figure this out.)
you had me at #!
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.
"Unfortunately, the font is only available at 120pt or higher, so it will takes twelve times the paper to print out your book report."
I'm willing to make that sacrifice if it means saving Mother Earth!
Just imagine how many electrons could be saved if people used this font in their browser.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
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.
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.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
to simply use a little less ink by printing each letter a little lighter? For example, turning on the "toner saver" mode in a laser printer. Particularly given that the "ecofont" is recommended for laser printers.
I have a way to save 100%. Don't print it!
Numbered among the Dutch are many of the greatest living (and dead) type designers in history.
This idea is pretty dumb though, and seems to be born of typographic ignorance.
you had me at #!
This has been a feature in printer drivers for donkeys ages ; I remember an "eco" mode that only printed the outlines of the font. Much more flexible than having to use a particular font, and not all that noticable at smaller print sizes.
If the font weren't so gosh-darn ugly, I might think about using it. On the other hand, consider how much time I'll save not reading things because they're ugly.
(Hey, it worked for dating.)
You know you were thinking it.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Probably why the summary and article say "ink" and not "toner".
The enemies of Democracy are
will it save while I view documents on my ereader?
-1 Wrong.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Holy Fonts, Batman!
Bruce Perens.
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?
I love how you get modded off-topic and some effin' cookie recipe gets modded informative. Slashdot's going to pot.
wouldn't printing using gray color produce the same effect with any font?
...or a company could just use the "draft" feature that most every bit of software has when the said person is not in need of presentation quality. Probably redundant, but yeah
In other news several Dutch legal firms were visited by executives from Epson, HP, and Lexmark, muttering about theft of lost revenues.
that's only on shitty printers. Real ones recycle the toner.
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.
On a CRT, plasma, or other direct emission display (OLEP, etc), the more black, the better.
On the other hand, on an LCD it can be more complicated. Is the resting state of the pixels "open" or "closed" to light? If "on" is the resting state, then the whiter the better. On the other hand, if "off" is the resting state, the blacker the better. On the third hand, if the display has a dynamic backlight that can be dimmed to provide blacker blacks, even with "on" as the resting state, with less backlight, "off" could be the overall lower power state.
Things sure were easier back in the monochrome character-generator-display days. To use less power, you'd just shut up and type shorter posts. :D
Seriously guys, can we grow up? Humorous or ironic tags are one thing, but this is just absurd.
I agree. Their idea is redundant as most letters come pre-made with holes in them.
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
Well the summary and article may have said that. But from the ecofont website:
Printing with a laser printer will give the best printing results
http://www.ecofont.eu/look_at_ecofont_en.html
I print all my documents inverted so this will actually cost me more ink!
Always back up, never back down. ---- Think you're cool 'cos your uid is prime? Take mine, modulo the one digit integers
Another way to save 100% of ink is to print it in braille.
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
Exactly. Which is worse, a few squirts of ink, or all the trees that are cut down so you can print out your inbox?
More music, fewer hits
just cut off the parts of the font that arn't needed
for starters, start off with an arial-looking font, you don't need all the little hooks at the end of each part of characters, that's wasted ink!
you'd probably be better off simply cutting out bits of each letter, for instance, if the pixel that connected the loop of the "e" to the rest of it suddenly was gone, no one would have trouble seeing it was an "e" even at small fonts... a similar solution could probably be found for most characters.
hw abt usng txt tlk n jst omt sum vwls r sumtn?
in general it's a bad idea.
f u cn rd ths u cn sv on prntg cst...
ask me how!
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
You have to use a font that is thick enough to have a bunch of holes cut out of it. You could save even more ink by printing in a smaller font.
That assertion is based on cost figures for newspaper classified pages; drop the font size, save a ton of ink and paper. Papers all over the country have been doing this for years as their margins shrink.
But apparently they could have switched to this larger font with holes in it! Genius!
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
..this is getting retarded.
My eco-efforts included making mine thinner...
But for those that do need to be on paper, you can save 20% just by using a 10 point font instead of a 12 point font!
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
You forgot the clever part.
Poke holes in the cookies before serving. The cookies are now 20% healthier!
just looks like the printer is running out of ink
Why not just print with the printer in "eco" mode or change the font color from black to dark gray? And, as another poster suggested, use a font with a smaller footprint (e.g. Courier New rather than Times New Roman).
Sent from my iPhone
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%!
As far as a company is concerned - the ink is a bigger problem. It costs a whole lot more.
No, we're trying to increase the quality of the trolling.
I'd rather see cookie recipes than the shit-eating porn or the guide to caring for your new nigger or hidden links to goatse guy.
Cookie recipes? Fucking A delicious... even if the recipe is a little wrong.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
I use invisible ink so you can't see how much ink I use. I also use CIA font for this ink in case you're wondering.
~ In Trust, We Trust ~
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.
"Ecofont" uses 75% more letters than plain old "font".
The software item with the greatest practical joke potential since desktop look-alike screensavers.
"I printed the nozzle check pattern a million times but my documents still all look like crap!"
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You know, everyone gets all up in arms about using paper. Do none of you realize that paper is a renewable resource?
...print everything as an outline.
Plus you have the added fun of being able to color in all the letters later!
I would've expected such an idea to come from Switzerland.
On the certain freeways signs they used a bunch of reflective dots on the pattern of letter or symbol and this font looks like that.
Good for rough drafts and other non-production work. However if your work is doing eco-friendly work maybe this font will be great to show how you are helping the environment.
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.
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.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
Oh, heh. That's funny.
The enemies of Democracy are
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.
Go stick your head in a pig!
Why don't you just print in say 80% blakc? If you have a color printer, you'd have to turn off the printers ability to help out with ink from the color cartridge. But, other than that, this should be the same thing
How about printing the glyph outlines. On the old Macs, this was a standard option.
That assertion is based on cost figures for newspaper classified pages; drop the font size, save a ton of ink and paper. Papers all over the country have been doing this for years as their margins shrink.
...yet another way to save paper :)
"Adobe Garamond"?
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.
If ink/toner costs are a serious concern for your company then you probably have bigger problems.
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 ..
Mmmm, Edam
Ages ago we were told computers would make the world paperless.
What ever happened to that?
The eco-boat.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
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.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
And for saving other things you could make sure everyone print ON BOTH SIDES OF THE FUCKING PAPER. Quite obvious but how many places do?
Another alternative would be to print on A5, I doubt it will lose much reading comprehension vs this.
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.
Yeah, as I watch the cleaning crew at work put the trash and the recycling bin contents into the same trash can every night...
Really, guys. I'm not that funny.
"The cup is in turn designed for holding hot or cold liquids, and has an open rim and closed base." --US Patent #5425497
I'm going to make the cookies tonight. I'll let everybody know.
"The cup is in turn designed for holding hot or cold liquids, and has an open rim and closed base." --US Patent #5425497
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
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Just give me a printer that draws on an Etch-a-Sketch. Ink problem solved.
My webcomic
And forests all over the (measured part of the) world is growing except in rain forest areas.
Which obviously is the worst place to do it at together with fucking up the oceans both by pollution and the damn fish eaters =P
I guess one can find bad paper, and in some cases you probably replace a nice mixed forrest with a boring whatever-pine-tree-one but anyway. Give me leafs!
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.
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.
ASCII and Unicode are going to be around for a long, long time. Same with Bitmaps, PNGs, GIFs, JPEGs, postscript, TeX, HTML, and dozens of other formats.
If you're storing all your documents in Proprietary Paperless Document Imaging System 2000<TM>, then yeah, be very afraid. Otherwise, not so much.
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.
Tim Smith - Ramblings from Nerd Land
When the world moves to OLED displays, the holes will increase the number of white pixels, which will increase energy consumption! That's assuming most programs show text on a black background... The contribution to greenhouse gases will be enormous. This font alone will cause the destruction of New York, Deep Impact-style. Mark my words.
At work we have one of those industrial printers that puts a header page with the name of the person doing the print job in big ahead of the job. Then we more or less 'sort' them on tables for people to come an pick up. There are users with thousands of pages accumulated over a few weeks gathering dust in a huge pile.
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.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
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.
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.
Sorry, but you're going to produce way more CO2 in transport and processing of that paper than is trapped in the paper. You're logic is flawed
Tim Smith - Ramblings from Nerd Land
That'_ simp_e just _iss out e_ery f_fth le_ter.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
How many holes does it take to fill "the Albert Hall"?
Obi-Wan: "I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were sudden
The Bell Centennial font, designed in 1976 for printing phonebooks, had "holes" designed into it for (excess) ink to flow into without compromising readability. http://www.nicksherman.com/articles/bellCentennial.html Interesting to see how the 'benefit' of holes has changed.
It's too bad this won't do much for the toner cartridges of the world that use page counters to estimate the quantity of toner remaining. I'm pretty sure our HP color laser and Brother multifunction aren't actually out of toner when they say they are. I've heard of these companies using an odometer of sorts to count to x pages of toner life and then call it dead regardless of actual toner usage.
Another point against Ecofont if they recommend laser printing over inkjets.
Can u pls use SI units? :)
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
that's not very practical. I would NEVER use this in a business setting. Take the pink copy of a duplicate set of forms and make a copy, then take that copy and scan it to pdf format to email, then print that at the other end. It's hard enough to read solid black text sometimes.
It doesn't take long for a document to become unreadable, and if all the text had holes then documents would be impossible to use at all after a few copies of copies.
Text with holes would quickly merge into a noisy background and become unreadable fast. Yay, you saved 20% of the toner used by people who do casual printing at home while doing nothing for businesses who use far more toner and ink.
This is like the air powered car. A neat idea that's pretty useless and causes more problems than it solves.
Won't anyone think of the gallons of ink and hundreds of trees that will be wasted by people printing pages to test this?
decrease the font size by a couple points. That'll decrease the amount of ink needed *and* won't be ugly. Or, just don't print it in the first place. Most text printed these days (especially around the office) never needed to be printed in the first place.
Typographers' discussion here: http://typophile.com/node/52616
In our University, printing used to be free until 2 years ago. Since the university started charging 3 cents per printout, the total number of printouts taken in computer labs has gone down by 70%. Perhaps your univ should try that out as well.
Face your daemons!
...seeing as a laser printer throws an entire page of black toner at the page, with the charged parts of the paper holding onto it.
Nope, that's wrong. Laser printers work by firing a laser in the pattern desired at a charged photoreceptor, which is then brushed with toner, and over which the paper rolls. The image is thus transferred, and the paper is heated to melt and fuse the toner, which would otherwise remain a fine dust.
Excess toner in the brushing stage is recycled.
in this font will they be even HOLEIER?
Will sermons be read from HOLIER SCRIPTURES?
If a junior/new priest reads from book at the altar, should the hail be "HOLEY HOLEY HOLEY LORD..."
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Holey shit.
Someone needs to do a rigorous survey of available fonts, plotting print-readability against ink-use. Then encumber the best fonts with a costly license!
Just set the printer driver to save ink. Almost all of them have that option now. The output is a little lighter (as would the version with holes be as well).
Now you can save money AND get your print out put to look the way you want.
Progress is amazing!
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
I cal kill 20-25% more trees with one toner cartridge!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
But we're using it at a faster pace than it can be renewed.
No, in fact forestation rates have been on the rise in North America for over 100 years. Wood use is a sustainable industry and I'm surprised the environmental movement has not been on board.
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).
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
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?
...obviously they ruled that out as that just wouldn't be very newsworthy at all, now would it?
"Behind Ecofont
[...] We tried lots of possible ink-saving-options. From extra thin letters to letters with outlines only.[/quote]
I agree that there's better ways to save ink, especially ways that apply to any font (put those halftone patterns to good use, for example), but it's a fun font to add to the collection if nothing else; if nothing else, we should applaud the fact that it's free (as in etc. - quite unlike the fonts you linked to, I might add)
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.
c++;
An easier way to save ink AND paper is this: use a sans serif font that has 1/2 the stroke weight and print multipage documents at a smaller size. If the stroke thickness is normally, say, 150 units, make it something like 80. Use a large X height to add to readability. Then print at 10pt instead of 12. Massive savings, and no need to resort to swiss cheese fonts which will look like crapola over 12 pt. Word.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
That might be true, but if you recycle the paper instead of dumping it in the landfill you would have that CO2 that is trapped in the paper left out in the air.
Those weren't "holes" they're called "ink traps" and they are more like wedges cut at the peak of negative angles. Ink naturally blots a tiny bit, especially at smaller sizes, so using the ink traps didn't save ink, it merely allowed for sharp angles (such as found in M or W) to print correctly at small sizes.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Yeah, because ADOBE is the company you want to emulate to not piss people off....
*GeminiDomino posting AC since I'm on an ubuntu livecd without passwordmaker.
A bt f cre8v splng cn sv bth ink & papr. Thez 2 sntncs hv svd 31% f bth.
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
Save the Earth!
Cut holes in the 20% of heads of Oil Company Executives, Bankers and Presidents!
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
...which really sucks when they're French...
Well is eco friendly because it is made from an recycled font....
Way to set up a donations page: linking to dutch paypal locale..
If I backup my software documents along with the software applications that read them - problem solved.
All I need then is a computer or emulator that can run whatever os is required by the system.
Not a problem as far as I'm concerned.
To be able to pierce holes in the font, they had to thicken it by making it bold, hence use more ink. This just defeats the whole purpose. Really stupid!
Cheep Cheep Cheep ASS!
[Citation Needed]
But besides, even if it is on the rise in "North America"... that doesn't mean the (deforestation) rate has decreased elsewhere in the world, and for the most part, its elsewhere in the world that has the really important (scale/density/etc) forests.
Oh...I just looked at the name of the file I downloaded, noted the company name, and found the font....although I've wasted immense amounts of time on simpler things than that...
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Why do you think I bought my eeepc?
Paper consumption peaked a few years ago and is now declining. As the old paper-oriented people retire and die off, demand for paper decreases. Young people are more likely to upload a photo to Flickr than print it on an inkjet.
Besides, if you're printing text, get something with a xerographic engine, a laser or LED printer. Toner is cheap.
*whistles as his karma goes to hell*
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
If you recycle it you end up with carbon free paper, and the carbon goes in the air?
I don't think so.
If you put it in the trash and it get burnt sure, but not if it's recycled.
How about reducing the font size by 10.5%?
On the other hand, now that the fonts require more complex spline sets and fill patterns to create, the processor controlling the printer is going to have to work harder, which means more electricity will be drawn, which means the coal-burning power plant will have to stay open an hour longer...
Whoever modded that "troll" should read this.
Mr. Period: Nine is the one that's right by ten!
Nine: One day I will kill him. Then, I will be Ten.
20% less sodium by volume: Your Mom should try Kosher Salt Flakes. They're like salt flavored snowflakes (which fluffs up the volume) and they tend to stick to the outside of food easily so you get a salty "taste" with less (by mass) salt.
f u cn rd ths u cn
I blushed when I read this: "fxxx xxu cxnx, rxdx thxs xxu cxnx"
Virtual Betting on Facebook for non-geeks.
Deforestation is almost exclusively the result of agricultural expansion. It makes no sense to say that saving paper = saving forests.
Here is what Wikipedia 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).
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?
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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.
Well aren't you a nice chap.
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.
Don't knock it until you try it. Go low-salt for a couple of months then eat a meal at a Chinese restaurant. You won't be able to taste anything but salt and you'll feel so thirsty that you'll think you've crawled through the Saharah.
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.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Over the lifetime of the printer, the transistors will have to switch much more often, causing them to fail sooner and to use more power. Think of the children!!!
In our University, printing used to be free until 2 years ago. Since the university started charging 3 cents per printout, the total number of printouts taken in computer labs has gone down by 70%. Perhaps your univ should try that out as well.
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.
Use a salt solution sprayed on your food. You get a much lower concentration in your food but the same flavour.
Get a laser printer. That saves most.
I got a year ago an used HP LaserJet 2300dn with 87% of cardige left. 49 Pounds, incl. shiping. Should altogether print about 6700 pages. Which ink printer can compete with this. I will make my PhD without refilling it for sure in the next 2 years...
You seriously do this? That's just awful
1h 51min not bad reaction time...
what's the different between an emo and an eco?
an eco uses less ink; otherwise they are the same.
It's based on a GPL typeface, right? One could just open the typeface in a "font"[sic] editor and save it with a new name.
Use a2ps or fineprint to reduce paper and ink usage. Lots of controls to manage multi page printing, duplex, rejecting dud pages before printing, blocking graphics etc.
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.
It was probably shot down because it was ridiculous, and almost certainly unenforceable assuming the prints were done for something even remotely work related.
What you should have suggested, and still should suggest if you're still having the problem, is to track and bill ALL printing costs to the department/project responsible and force them to budget for it.
On that note, check out their license 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 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?
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
It's not really the idea of the holes it's just coming up with another way to give less ink / toner from the cartridge. These guys want to stop and go with the usage giving you 100% black / color with small 0% black spots all over it. This is the extreme idea but can also be solved by lowering the black from 100% all the time to about 80% and have a clean looking image / text printout which would likely be more pleasing on the eyes.
Even evaluating different brightness values of the paper you buy will increase contrast and likely lower your acceptable black level for increased savings.
A loop, by its nature, continues. If that didn't make sense, start reading this sentence again.
We could just switch to Dutch, then we can all spell 'the' as 'de' and save heaps of letters!
URW? MS? A lot do...
Yeah, because students are never required to spend extra money on projects.
My wife only printed 3000 pages in a year of her Master in French Literature. This is all drafts ect, not just final turn in.
The cost would only be $90.00
Compared to the cost of a single credit hour at even a cheap college or university it is not really all that much.
your talking about $3-$6 in a class that costs hundreds or more.
Additionally I assure graphic designers are required to get non-free work done at printers. And a lot of other classes may not have strictly required purchases, but damned close to it.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Lipton Chicken Noodle soup comes in two varieties. One makes 4 cups of soup, and the other (advertising 33% less sodium) makes 3 cups.
Companies do this all the time :/
So let me get this straight. You buy empty perfume bottles and fill them with isoprop, giving them to your mom as gifts, since she can't tell the difference anyway?
Why not give her something she'd actually get some use out of, instead of playing to her weakness? I'm sure that if she wanted isoprop, she'd apply it without the trickery.
By recycling it instead it gets transported two or three times as much as recycled paper, leaving a larger carbon footprint and the toxic chemicals used to wash off the ink need disposing.
Nice font though.
Did you look at the font?
It looks like your printer is out of toner ;-)
That should read "gets transported two or three times more then non-recycled paper".
Yeah, if it's burned, if you bury it then it's trapped underground.
Recycled paper needs to be transported more times, two to three trips and the toxic chemicals used to wash off the ink need disposing too.
It's a complete waste of time and leaves a bigger carbon footprint.
Because she thinks that I'm giving her something expensive and nice and it costs me almost nothing. Buying her stuff she could use might actually cost some real dough.
Yes, if she wanted to apply isopropyl alcohol she'd do it herself.
No, I don't really do this. As a gag one year I bought a large bottle of ipa and pasted on a fake Chanel No. 5 label. She thought it was funny.
Me too. Txt-speak sure isn't lossless compression.
That's an understatement. I just installed this things and was extremely unimpressed.
Anyone here remember those old dot matrix ribbon printers from the 80's and early 90's? Remember how bad their print quality was? Well, with this font, you can enjoy that same level of quality on your screen as well as your printout!
So yeah, unless you are a glutton for ribbon printer nostalgia, this thing is terrible.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
If you want to get technical, "Garamond" is a more generic moniker given to a group of typefaces made by many different companies. Adobe attaches their name to it because it's specifically their version of it. But when you've created a unique typeface with a unique name, it's kind of pointless to brand it.
I find I have to print like 500X over to make the ink raised enough for a braille reader. On the plus side, they don't know they have inky fingers.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
http://printgreener.com/evergreen.html
Were that I say, pancakes?
Yeah, well "you're" grammar is flawed.
It's called Economode on HP printers, it uses less toner on every page printed through the printer. Similar settings are also available on most other printers. Although to be honest I never see anyone using this, unless it's as a trouble call that something is wrong with the printer.
I Need someone to rebuild a Digitech Digital Delay pedal for me....for me...for me...for me.
Yes, but paper production is also a very energy intensive process, and the byproducts of production are fairly polluting. Just because it is "renewable" doesn't mean using it can be done without limits. There is more to the equation than just "we can grow more of the primary raw material", there is an environmental, social, and economic balance that has to be considered.
'Every story, if continued long enough, ends in death.' --Ernest Hemingway
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.
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.
The details are trivial and useless; The reasons, as always, purely human ones.
Maybe you'd have better luck if you had the head of the hip new green initiative at your company repackage your suggestion as part of a longer list; since they have a mandate from management, they might have better luck with it.
There is a reasonable goal, though, of offering up front pricing to your students. There are many students on tight budgets for whom an extra $100 in printing costs that come as a surprise may mean dropping the class.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Seriously, can someone explain why someone would think it necessary or even grammatically permissible to put quotes around a proper name?
People use quotation marks in ways that make me smirk, then sigh, then become flummoxed. Am I the only one? Is there a method to the madness?
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.
The details are trivial and useless; The reasons, as always, purely human ones.
I think you're confused about the difference between recycling and renewable resources.
The details are trivial and useless; The reasons, as always, purely human ones.
Who the fuck prints out their entire inbox? If that is happening, the problem isn't deforestation, it's wasteful morons.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
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?
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
All this font accomplishes at smaller sizes (at which the holes are less than 2 pixels wide) is to cause the printed document to come out in grey instead of black. You could save more ink, and get more consistent results, by just changing all of your black text to 75% grey.
Post script is 24 years old, I bet PDF keeps a similar track record.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
We scan claim forms at my work and the Dot Matrix print is the hardest on OCR. If it is just for reading though, it is a great idea. The human brain is good at filling in blank spots.
Get a laser printer. Way cheaper to operate.
this is my sig
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.
The cost is 3c/page. Its not surprising at all. Just the fact that printing out a Dilbert cartoon to put on their corkboard would now cost them money, keeps people from printing things that aren't essential.
Face your daemons!
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.
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.
The details are trivial and useless; The reasons, as always, purely human ones.
I'm not sure how printing on both sides of the paper saves on ink.
Besides, printing on both sides of the paper is a pretty big hassle. If your printer errantly grabs two sheets of paper in the middle of your job, you're pretty much screwed.
The details are trivial and useless; The reasons, as always, purely human ones.
As long as the class requires you to pay for your own books, notebooks and pens, I think even the poorest student can afford to pay $1 to print a 30 page report.
I even had a teacher who made us buy way overpriced "blue books" (A cover made of blue paper with sheets of standard lined notebook paper stapled inside) to take our tests in. I didn't object to the cost as much as the idea that the rest of my notebook paper wasn't good enough for him
When I was 23 and naive, I took a job as the sysadmin for a large high school. Like an idiot, I formed a technology committee of one person from each academic department to advise me. The math department head spent multiple meetings talking her head off against laser printers. Her arguments:
- Inkjet cartridges cost only $25 each, and I was pushing laser printers that needed $70 toner cartridges.
- Laser printer toner page yields are "your mileage may vary", so the 4000-page estimate from HP isn't accurate.
GeminiDomino posting AC since I'm on an ubuntu livecd without passwordmaker.
Who GIVES a shit? Do you think you are FAMOUS or something? Wow.
Well, I am actually Dutch and I'm sad to say that on average sentences in my native language are longer than sentences in English, although usually only slightly so.
Wel, ik ben daadwerkelijk een Nederlander en het spijt me te zeggen dat zinnen in mijn moedertaal gemiddeld langer zijn dan zinnen in het Engels, hoewel doorgaans slechts een klein beetje.
(However, Dutch spelling has other huge benefits over English spelling. Although unless the government doesn't pussy out on the next spelling reform like they did last time, we will be overtaken by the French and Germans when it comes to quality as well as quantity. If that hasn't already happened.)
Read it again, I had already made a post for saving on ink/toner, this one was for other things, although A5 works for ink to if you print at half size.
If it prints on one side and then on the other would picking up two papers really be such a big deal? Just print those 2 pages again? Also a decent printer shouldn't pick up two papers in the first place should it?
In our case, our university tracked each student's print amount and you could buy more pages at 5 cents per page.
But each course you took at university credited you with a certain quota for that paper.
(So, a course might give you 100 pages. Beyond that, you had to buy more.)
that, and we have these vast tracts of land we refer to as national parks, where we vehemently prevent natural burn offs, that naturally cull forests. I'm not saying that finding an economical, non-petroleum based alternative to harvesting billions of trees to make paper and houses is a bad thing, but i swear to you, the day we actually find an easier, cheeper, faster way to build a house or write a note, we'll switch. (and don't say concrete. concrete is expensive, and a pain in the @$$ to build with in residential terms)
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
and trees harvest themselves and walk to paper the factory?
and trashed paper walks to the landfill?
and making paper from tree takes less energy than recycling it?
I do not have any hard number on this but I'm really not sure recycling paper is more wastful then trashing it.
I hate to break it to you, but in this day and age, at least in the US, not one person is clearcutting forested land to grow corn or raise beef cattle. contrary to popular opinion, cattle do not require open, treeless land to grow. amazingly enough, they fare extremely well in forested areas, mountains, deserts, and other seemingly "non cow" locations. If you grow corn, you don't look at forested land, you look at land that is not going to cost you a fortune and a half to remove the trees from, remove the tree stumps from, remove the inevitable boulders that go with trees and stumps, Level the land, and *then* grow corn. you buy flat clear land in the midwest, where they grow corn already, and you grow corn. more tree cutting damage comes from the oil industry than the cattle and corn industries combined.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
Yeah seriously. Who the hell buys inkjet printers? You can get a decent LaserJet for just a little bit more now. People have these inkjet printers because they come free with computers so often. Greatest scheme ever: give the printer and half-filled cartridges for free, over-price new cartridges!
If it prints on one side and then on the other would picking up two papers really be such a big deal? Just print those 2 pages again? Also a decent printer shouldn't pick up two papers in the first place should it?
I'm not sure if you're suggesting something different, like using one of those expensive printers with printing heads on both sides of the page, but usually to print on both sides of the paper you first print all the even-numbered pages in reverse order, then put them back in the printer tray (and double-check that you have them in the right way around!) and print all the odd-numbered pages. So if you print the even-numbered pages and get:
8, 6, blank, 4, 2
And then it prints the even pages flawlessly, you end up with your pages in this order (grouped by physical pages):
(1, 2), (3, 4), (5, blank), (7, 6), (9, 8)
Assuming this problem only occurred once, you can just flip every page after the fifth page to get the right order, but you still have this blank page in the middle. So if you actually care about how competent you look when you pass this document off to somebody else, you have to re-print everything from page 5 onward.
This might not be a problem on high-end printers, but I think you'll find that mid-range and low-end printers are far more common.
The details are trivial and useless; The reasons, as always, purely human ones.
Fail. This font offers standard-to-low readability and low ink usage. Your "much better" proposal offers low readability with low ink usage. Combine the 2 and you have low readability and really low ink usage. /Who are the retards who mod this shit up?
You just made that up, right? Most paper is made out of trees that are planted to make paper... at least so I'm told, and I have no troubles believing that... the actual problem of course is recklessly cutting down rainforests which need many centuries if not more to become as diverse as they are, not planting trees and cutting them down a few years later... HUGE difference, and saying "every bit helps" makes the issue muddy and therefore actually hurts.
If anything, one could talk about chemicals used when making paper, or energy consumption.
...forestation rates have been on the rise in North America for over 100 years.
What about the rates over the last 200 years? 100 years ago was shortly after the railroads deforested the nation, was it not?
hemp paper? Lots of famous documents were written on it...
Obama should do something about it.
We need alternatives or the patents need to be busted. It's a joke we can't make cloned cartridges.
How the hell do they get away with that?
Ink cartridge filled with ink only costs a dollar to the manufacturers.
What do I expect from the Dutch? I expect cock rings! and dildos! and anal probes! and windmill cookies! and giant lesbians! and drunken soccer fans! and losers carrying flowers upside down by the stems! and wooden shoes! and tiny cars imported from Spain and France! and pot smokers! and whores in the parks! and canals! and birth canals! and motherfucking cobblestone streets! and boats! and weird accents! and Bulgarians on vacation! and Oranjeboom piss! and Yanks no Thanks! and blondes with bad haircuts! and pierced nipples! and leather! and immense faggotry regarding Tin Tin! and Swamp Germans! and bridges! and dykes! and fingers in dykes! and the friggin' North Sea!
THAT is what I expect from the Dutch.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
I original came from BC, Canada. Lumber is a major market there, and is used both for construction materials and paper (pulp). The trees are re-planted regularly, but it can take quite awhile to regrow a forest.
The more recent issues arising were that the majority of trees being planted were a certain variety of pine that grew fairly fast and was easy to harvest again in the future.
Unfortunately, a plague of "pine beetles" hit the province and has been decimating forests, partly due to the fact that these trees were used in such abundance.
So even replanting has issues if not done correctly. Trees may be replaced, but it's not always quite the same as what was there before.
You're accusing the salt companies of being somewhat false in their advertising, but you're giving your mom bottles of isopropyl alcohol instead of perfume? While she might not smell it, I'm guessing that others around her do, and either way one is as false as the other.
There are classes that involve writing an encyclopedia? At 3 cents a page, $100 is over 3300 pages. I haven't printed that many pages in 4 years of undergrad. Considering that, on average, each class requires about $200 in textbooks (many of which are not even necessary), that's a ludicrous argument.
Have you ever even seen a live cow? It's fairly obvious you've never been on a farm.
the day we actually find an easier, cheeper, faster way to build a house or write a note, we'll switch. (and don't say concrete. concrete is expensive, and a pain in the @$$ to build with in residential terms)
Bricks? For houses that is, not notes.
I have found that steel and concrete floors block wifi, so its not all good. I love that fact that it means that the risk of fires is hugely reduced.
... Yay for brick!
Forget the isopropyl. Fill it with ethanol and acetone. That way when she goes out she can be the center of conversation as people gossip behind her back about what a lush she's become.
Notmysig
You should really upgrade to sticky yellow notes to prevent such disasters in the future.
And a remarkably stupid one, though I guess it did get them some attention.
I suppose you could argue that using hemp paper leads to deforestation. But we mostly use wood pulp for paper.
It's not free - it's just included in the IT fees that you pay your school. Most schools have "free" printing to a certain point (X pages per week or per semester), and then pay-per-page after that.
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."
"Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand" - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Many Laser printers support a toner save mode in which they automatically reduce your picture to an outline. It would be much simpler to just activate that function.
I did some calculations for a project I worked on at PaperCut Software. The true environmental cost is not the ink, nor the printer, put the paper. The energy and environmental impact of paper production is scary. It takes 17 Watt hours just to make one sheet, or 8.6g of CO2 per sheet! (see here for details http://www.papercut.com/products/ng/manual/ch-sys-mgmt-environmental-impact.html) Saving the holes in the ink is not going to do much. The real savings are saving paper. For example, many of the schools running our print quota software see a drop in paper by up to 80% over free printing. That's a lot better for the environment that a few empty holes :-)
It would seem to me that one could slightly modify the locations of the holes in each letter and create a very hard to detect information-carrying channel in your printouts.
Of course, posting this to the end of a >300 comment Slashdot discussion is in itself a form of stego, but, whatever... <shrugs>
Go stick your head in a pig!
MMmmmmm......Bacon.....
Renewable or not It's still a huge waste of resources to grow trees, cut them down, mill them, ship them, use them, and landfill them (or even recycle them) if you don't actually need to use them in the first place.
If you do need to use them, fine. But a hell of a lot of what we use today is waste.
Cheers.
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
Salt doesn't have much, if any, of an aromatic component, so you can definitely taste it even without a sense of smell....
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
anyone else been told by the printer driver software that it's time to change the ink cartridges? only when you take it out, you can clearly see around half a cartridge of ink left...
All business class printers worth buying do automatic duplexing. Anything lacking duplexing is a consumer toy or someone saving capital costs but wasting consumables and/or employee time.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Also using more paper increases the demand for paper and trees, which will increase the number of trees being planted to make paper.
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.
True, but not the whole truth. Deforestation to create a new crop is always worse than sustainable forests (even if grown-for-paper), but grown-for-paper forests are usually not sustainable (mono-cultures, weak bio-diversity, usually increased water consumption).
I am from a country with a LARGE paper production industry, and I've seen first hand the razing of indigenous species to create paper-friendly forests... It wasn't pretty, even if the new forests are denser than before, with more trees, the bio-diversity took a nose-dive.
Will some enterprising company use this technique to reduce body size, and therefore casket and grave size, to cut burial costs?
Or are there some holes in my idea (cha-ching!)
Wow, that was bad even for me.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
... say, a 80% gray... which is btw exactly what the ecofont will appear when considered at real-life sizes instead of their superlarge demo image...
Herve S.
Ok, I must admit, I'm a bit confused. Wouldn't an OUTLINE font be better that one with holes in it?
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.
Eliminating the letters e, t, and a would save about 20% of the ink... and you could use any font you want. There. Eco font is stupid.
The Admin and the Engineer
Not really better, though, is it?
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
I'm going to use it for the remainder of this post!
Oooo oooooooo oooooo oooooo ooo oooooooo ooooo oooo oooooooooo
Ooooo oooooo ooooo oooo ooooo
www.nodicerpg.com - Some RP stuff for free, some not so for free, but still cheap.
Yes it uses more energy to recycle paper and harms the environment.
If we're talking about aluminium cans then you'd be correct because they take much less energy to recycle.
A plantation is not a forest or jungle - very big difference.
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.
This is flat out false, for the simple reason that tuition costs are not going to go down because printing isn't included anymore. In reality, this kind of thing works as follows:
1) Printing (or whatever) is not included in your tuition (or whatever) costs, but rather costs extra.
2) Printing will be covered by your tuition costs from now on so you won't have to pay extra for it anymore. In order to compensate for this, we're going to raise tuition costs by $AMOUNT, which is considerably more than you paid for printing before.
3) (Time passes) Because people actually dare use the free printing included in tuition, printing will not be covered by tuition anymore; you will have to pay extra for it again, and each page will cost you $SUM, which is much more than the actual costs of printing a page. Tuition will not go down.
Seriously, it's EXACTLY like an ISP offering you an "unlimited" plan and then complaining if you go over a random secret bandwidth cap and telling you you'll have to pay extra from now on. The only twist is that it's even worse because the ISP will ALSO keep on charging you for your unlimited plan which you can't use anymore now.
Most paper will be readable in 30 years. Will your digital documents?
Yes, as long as I keep maintaining their readability (that applies to paper) they will last. Indefinitely in fact (unlike paper).
so even if you've still got a medium which is readable (cdroms in 30 years? Probably not...)
This REALLY isn't hard to solve: Every five to ten years or so, simply copy your document archive to $MEDIUM_OF_THE_DAY$.
Zapf Dingbats
bickerdyke
Low salt intake can cause health problems like low blood pressure (which can cause e.g. tiredness or fainting). You NEED some salt.
There's a hole in my letters, dear Liza, dear Liza...
Just chop out all the vowels and print like it's lolspeak
This font obviously has a lot more vector points than typical fonts so rendering both on PC while working with it and printer when printing must contribute to more CPU usage and as such greater electricity usage. Slow rending time on older laser printers must also maintain the roller/heater parts at print temperatures for longer too. The net results is it *may* waste more $ in electricity than it saves in toner....
I grew up on a ranch. where people raise cows in numbers over thousands. Farms are where people grow corn, wheat, and other plants. your stereotypical "farm" where there are 20 cows on the back lot, some pigs, a few sheep, and some chickens? the only people that do that are the arrogant bastards that move out of the city and decide that they have to be "farmers"
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
which is likely at least partly because the settlers killed off most of the bisons that kept the young trees in check. Bisons, buffalos, cattle, etc all eat young trees preventing grass to become forest. Naturally the trees always win from other vegetation as long as the climate isn't too dry/cold/whatever.
So didn't anyone read the license?
That's the best part:
In the Ecofont the following regulation is enclosed:
Copyright (C) 2008 SPRANQ creative communications, Utrecht, The Netherlands.
All right reserved. Ecofont is a trademark of SPRANQ creative communications.
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. Imitation of this technique is prohibited.
The Ecofont is distributed under GPL and based upon Bitstream Vera. The following licence
paragraph applies...
And then after the Bitstream Vera requirements...
To protect the purity of the Ecofont and its communication, the further development of the Ecofont
and the use of its technique - which includes omitting different shapes in the letters or the use in
other font types - is only allowed if permission is granted by SPRANQ. A signed licence agreement
can only be obtained by contacting SPRANQ (www.spranq.eu). SPRANQ is not obliged to grant
permission. Selling the Ecofont or a variation of it to make a profit is strictly prohibited.
I do not believe these people understand the GPL. Don't use this font, it's incorrectly licensed.
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.
Another more modern alternative is to allow untouched forest land to qualify as a carbon offset in a cap-and-trade system. We would stop using the wood from that forest completely, yet the forest would still have a value and would therefore not be turned into grazing land or houses or what have you (and thus effectively destroyed).
It is a bit pathetic that we have to assign a value to something to keep it from being destroyed, but at least people are getting awfully clever about assigning values to things...
What?! Where's the cookie recipe?
The difference is that tuition is a single lump sum, paid once per semester, that often isn't "real money" anyway. Often it's loans, or parent's money, or something else that isn't in the front of your consciousness. If it goes up or down, say, $100 to cover the cost of printing for a semester, you aren't even going to notice.
Paying for printing, however, is something you are confronted with each and every time you print. Over time, this constant reminder trains you to think twice before hitting print. In other words, it makes you take notice and adjust your behavior accordingly.
In as far as this tends to encourage thought and conservation, I applaud it.
Actually, isn't most recycled paper pre-consumer? Like cut ends and thing that wouldn't have ink on them and don't need to be recollected? If you look at the back of recycled paper items they usually list the post-consumer percentage and it's usually in the range of like 1-5%.
...no two people are not on fire.
That's one hell of a lot of "Print Test Pages"
Hemp paper...the way to go.
actualy my wife is currently getting her masters via distance ed. the cost.. 115$ a credit hour.. so 90$ in printing for a 3 hour (345$) class is a 26% cost increase.. now granted it is distance ed so she just uses the home printer.. but not all college's rape the student as bad as most.
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
So just decrease the quality even more if you want it to look even worse, big deal? /ali
Brick houses are expensive. Many "brick" homes just have a brick face to make them look fancy & expensive.
Yes, you can get a brick house. Or a stone house. But that will significantly raise the price, so it's more of a luxury option. Plus, all the interior walls are going to be wood anyway.
Not to mention, the OP said "easier, cheaper, faster". Brick is none of those adjectives compared to wood with vinyl siding.
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
I think its dangerous to simply assume that there is net benefit to the environment of something like this, without considering the total cost of using this font. A font full of holes will be considerably more computationally intensive to render than a solid one, which might keep a computer or a printer out of power saving mode longer, which may ultimately offset the saved ink with wasted electricity. This may or may not be true, but it needs to be considered before making the claim that this is good for the environment. I would argue that setting your printer's darkness setting to 80% would save an equal amount of toner, without the risk of increasing computational cost and energy consumption.
I installed it and I'm keeping it. It reminds me of Erector sets, and that is good enough reason to hold onto 250k of data.
Think Deeply.
My college charged $.05 per page for B&W and $.10 per page for colour (single or double-sided cost the same amount per sheet of paper, if the printer was capable of duplexing). We got a weekly allowance equivalent to 300 pages of B&W, IIRC (use it or lose it, of course). I think that was a fair compromise... your tuition/lab fees did pay for the supplies involved in using the printers, but the limit was there to remind people that their tuition went only so far toward paper/toner and if they went nuts with the printers and used more than their fair share they would be charged extra.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Sure... just send an e-mail to subscribe@newsletter.org and in the subject line please indicate your preference of "plain text", "HTML", or "PDF".
You just need the appropriate archaic hardware/software capable of reading them.
As long as I can run the current version of OO.o (either natively or emulated), I'll be able to open my old Word documents. As long as I can run Adobe Reader, I'll be able to open my old PDF files.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
It was probably shot down because it was ridiculous, and almost certainly unenforceable assuming the prints were done for something even remotely work related.
Why? If something was never picked up, it was obviously unnecessary. There shouldn't be a free pass given for wasting company resources just because the pages had something work-related on them... if I want to print 500 copies of yesterday's balance sheet and drop them straight into my wastecan, it shouldn't be tolerated.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Geez. If the filename didn't tip you off, you could have always double-clicked it and the TTF viewer would have told you the font name.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
If the fonts are sent to the printer as vector shapes, the printer can do that natively. Some laser printers have this feature in the advanced print setup options. My parents' printer does.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
When you look at a hole, what do you see? Whatever's behind it!
I assume they measure readability by putting the piece of paper on a white surface and see if it is still readable.
If it is still readable, then why in the world are they using holes? Instead of using holes, just don't put ink where the holes are. They found a way of minimize the ink needed to print a letter. I imagine it would be be like courier new or some font like that, without cleartype on.
Ha! Yeah right. I go to a huge university (Ohio State) and this is certainly NOT the case. We have papers due in hardcopy format and printing is about 3 cents a page, I believe.
Bricks? For houses that is, not notes.
Expensive.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
The problem isn't that people don't assign value to the forest. The problem is that they assign more value to human life. People act like farmers who move in and clear cut forests have nothing but evil intentions, but nothing could be further from the truth. Many of these people are starving to death, and their only goal is to produce food so that they may go on living.
In the US and Europe, we have already cut down all the trees necessary to use all the potential farmland. We all have plenty to eat as a result. It is unreasonable to expect people in other countries not to do the same. Who wants to starve to death?
The environment is important, because it filters our air and our water and provides us with food. Some would argue that it has "intrinsic" value. In my opinion, most of the really beautiful places on earth will remain untouched because they are so inaccessible or they have nothing of value.
I think it makes sense to safeguard the environment, but I don't think that means it has to remain untouched. If we can use wood from the forest to build houses, and the forest will grow back, we should do so. If we can use oil to build functional, sustainable infrastructure we should do so. If we can build dams to get water for agriculture, we should do that too. It's okay to make changes to the environment. We're humans and that's what we do. We only need to be careful to make sure we do it in a responsible, sustainable way.
Why are the 1800's relevant when those practices have largely ceased? We're on an upward trend.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Here are a couple cheap and easy ways to get rid of forest for farmland.
If it is old growth call a company that wants to harvest it for lumber. Make it a requirement that they remove the stumps. Depending on the economy with that requirement at worst you'll pay nothing for them to take the trees. If wood is at a premium or if you have really nice growth or hardwoods you'll make a profit. Not every lumber company would be willing to make that deal but some are. Especially the guys who cut it into boards on site.
If the trees are junk fast growth trees you slash and burn. Cheap & easy. I don't live in a dry state so in my area you don't even need to get a permit for this. You just call and leave a message on the machine of the local volunteer fired department. Girdle the trees in late summer/fall and burn in the spring and you are ready for early planting. You probably won't even need to fertilize the first couple of years.
As for stones and boulders if you farm in a "glacier state" you are already used to growing boulders and rocks and it is just part of life. You take your rock picker or rock rake you and clear them. Heck you can even sell the rocks to landscapers or the public.
I'll agree though that farming and ranching isn't what is the biggest threat to the forests. According to US Forest Services the biggest threat to the forests (at least in 2005 when it was written) is urban development. U.S. Department of Agriculture "Forests on the Edge - Housing Development on America's Private Forests" (2005) http://www.fs.fed.us/projects/fote/reports/fote-6-9-05.pdf An interesting side note and more applicable to question of paper use, it looks like the Forest Service is researching urban tree utilization for wood and paper products.
Don't anthropomorphize computers. They *hate* that.
Eliminating the letters e, t, and a would save about 20% of the ink...
What would you call that... cofon?
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
And what do we expect from Profane MuthaFucka? ... oh nevermind.
Just have everyone use 20% less words in their documents, that works too, i.e.:
MEMORANDUM
Date: July 1, 200
To: Harold Sr.
: Isabel
Subject: for Payroll Advances
There is new procedure (to reflect) for obtaining payroll advances. I believe will find it improvement over the old, confusing. The new is as:
1. Obtain special Form number, Request for, from your.
2. Complete the form in all the blanks in the section of the.
3. Have your immediate approve your request by signing on the Supervisor.
4. Take the approved Form the receptionist in the Payroll and, Building Z, Room.
Thank,
Hmmm... on second thought... um, maybe not.
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.
99.9% of the paper I use won't be readable soon after I flush it.
I don't know where you print your pages, but my school charged 9c per page, and it would not be uncommon to need to print out 50 page/day to do your work.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
People in legal cases.
========================================
Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
Sounds more like they switched to a dot-matrix printer. It too has little dots in all of its fonts. It also saves a ton when you're trying to print graphics...
"On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog!" - a dog
The thing that bothers me is when colleges require the students to print out worksheets and handouts on their own dime. An industrial photocopier is going to be cheaper and more efficient than having all the students print the stuff out on their own inkjets or even on the lab laser printers. It's more of a way to shift costs to the students (with a significant hike in costs to the student) than anything else.
Read the thread.
it was about $.03/page reducing printing 70%
Has she ever printed 3000 pages for a single course?
I was specifically responding to someone that said $.03/page was an unjust fee for students.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
I figured it would have been the Swiss.
How is this different from making the font color gray?
In the old days, this would have prompted a joke involving Dutch stereotypes of penny pinching. Scots and Jews also shared the stereotype, but it seems now you're only allowed to say that about Indians? Damn political correctness!
3k for a class no.. but then she is someone who is happy to read the material online and tries not to kill trees.. but i know people at work that if in the same situation would kill a printer just for the hell of it
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
Read the thread. That wasn't what I was responding to.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
3 * +5 funny in a row. You must receive the price of most funny lobster on slashdot ;)
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
Draft mode for the win!
a duplex printer together with draft mode saves trees too!
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
The all around price is higher (unit, consumables) and people assume it eats toner like an inkjet so they'll be spending $100 every other week for toner instead of $30 for ink. Of course that simply isn't true. I gave my girlfriend's family my old LaserJet IIIp and external print server (I upgraded to a 2100TN/M I got for $5 at the local university surplus sale) because they were buying ink every other week. They didn't believe me when I said the laser toner would last much longer than the inkjet.
this is my sig
...how much more ink is saved when using outline format? Granted, it looks like crap on a monitor, at normal reading size.
They wear fonts with dick holes in 'em
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Just set the economy mode as default on your printer. Done. Even $70 laser printers and $30 inkjets I've bought for the last 10 years have economy modes, and they'll work with any font and with graphics.
If you need to print something "nice" just turn it off for that print job.