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.
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.
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.