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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.
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.
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?
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.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
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.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.