Email article
We all like saving money. Recently I posted about 5 tools which can help you print more efficiently and thus save you money. Here is another way on how to save money related to printing; however for this one you do not have to claw in your printing habits (even though you should think of ways to minimize your printing if can be).
EcoFont is an open source, free font that has been custom designed to use less ink per letter verses, say, Times New Roman. It does this by incorporating tiny holes in each letter instead of what would normally be a solid line:
The effect of having holes incorporated in each letter instead of a solid line is you save up to 20% ink while printing (actual savings will vary obviously). At the risk of sounding stupid, I must mention the larger font size you use the more ink you will save and the more visible the holes will be. However notice at the norm of 12 size font the holes are hardly noticeable and the words are easy to read. Here is a comparison of EcoFont with other popular fonts:
As you can see EcoFont is not an exact copy of Time News Roman or Arial so I would not use EcoFont on, say, a college term paper or quarterly report at work without first getting prior permission. However for our everyday printing needs, this font can really help cut back on ink costs. Save money and save the environment. Best of all EcoFont works on Mac OSX and Linux in addition to Windows.
If you would like to be able to print webpages, not just Word documents and other font-controllable files, in EcoFont the best way to do it is to install Printee for Internet Explorer, load the webpage you want to print in IE, and use Printee to change the font to EcoFont (Printee supports EcoFont). You may also set the default font in Firefox and IE to be EcoFont but honestly that does not do much because the font type for a website is largely out of your control.
One thing to note though is after you install EcoFont, it is installed as “Spranq eco sans” so you won’t find it under “EcoFont”:
You may download EcoFont from the following link:
