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."
But, what do you expect from the Dutch?
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 #!
They act like they know what they are talking about, even when they don't.
The confirmation that you have in fact been talking to a simulation of someone who understands what you are saying often comes too late.
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.
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.
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 #!
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2 cups semisweet chocolate chips
if desired, 1 cup chopped pecans
Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe Directions
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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.
...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. The toner that hits the non-charged holes will just fall into the waste toner holder.
Would work better on inkjet printers though.
n/t
you had me at #!
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
will it save while I view documents on my ereader?
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?
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.
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 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
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.
..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.
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
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 ~
"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
...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.
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
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. "
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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?
Typographers' discussion here: http://typophile.com/node/52616
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.
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)
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.
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.
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...
Well is eco friendly because it is made from an recycled font....
Way to set up a donations page: linking to dutch paypal locale..
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!
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 . .
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...
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!!!
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...
what's the different between an emo and an eco?
an eco uses less ink; otherwise they are the same.
We could just switch to Dutch, then we can all spell 'the' as 'de' and save heaps of letters!
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.
http://printgreener.com/evergreen.html
Were that I say, pancakes?
Yeah, well "you're" grammar is flawed.
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?
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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>
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...
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?
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.
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....
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
I figured it would have been the Swiss.
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..
...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