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
I have a way to save 100%. Don't print it!
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?
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.
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
f u cn rd ths u cn sv on prntg cst...
ask me how!
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
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!
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.
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.
You know, everyone gets all up in arms about using paper. Do none of you realize that paper is a renewable resource?
I would've expected such an idea to come from Switzerland.
Yeah, but it uses up all your gray ink.
"The cup is in turn designed for holding hot or cold liquids, and has an open rim and closed base." --US Patent #5425497
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?
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!
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 :)
I print on the finest amazon rainforest paper, with several layers of black ink, and then dust the wet ink with ground up dark-roasted panda bones.
"The cup is in turn designed for holding hot or cold liquids, and has an open rim and closed base." --US Patent #5425497
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.
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 ..
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
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.
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?
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.
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
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
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!
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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
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.
...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?
Guess what: EVERYTHING you buy costs a fraction of its price to manufacture. If you don't like the price of inkjet printer cartridges, you are free to not buy inkjet printers. Printer manufacturers have found that people prefer buying cheap printers to buying expensive printers with cheap cartridges.
If you don't like the price of inkjet cartridges, you are more than welcome to buy laser printers, all of which are far cheaper to operate than inkjets. You can buy a laser printer for 50 bucks these days. Just stop whining and demanding government handouts, it's getting a little out of hand.
And a remarkably stupid one, though I guess it did get them some attention.
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.
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.
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.
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.