New York, NY -- Previously at Castle Ink we mentioned the availability of a font called “EcoFont” which was a means of saving money with printing. However, as nice as it sounds, you had to pay to get access to it and set it up on your word processing program. In a story from the Associated Press (AP) out of Milwaukee, WI, you can save money by choosing to print with fonts you already have. It is not going to create thousands of dollars of savings, but in this economy, every bit helps.
The AP points to a Dutch website, Printer.com, whose study convinced users at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay to ask their faculty and staff to use Century Gothic as the font on any printed document. Their IT department said that the response thus far has been positive and that the school will make the default email font Century Gothic soon. The school, which currently enrolls about 6,500 students is anticipating a savings of $5,000 to $10,000 annually with the switch.
The top font on the list in addition to Century Gothic was Times New Roman. The next level of fonts included Calibri, Verdana, Arial. The third level of fonts included Trebuchet, Tahoma and Franklin Gothic Medium. According the research, Century Gothic can use as much as 30% less ink than Arial.
According to Thom Brown, an ink researcher at HP, the amount of ink a font uses is proportional to the thickness of its lines. Fonts which are serif, or “those with short horizontal lines at the top and bottom of characters”, are more ink friendly than sans serif ones.
However, it is important to note that while Century Gothic is a thinner font, each character is wider which could impact the amount of space it takes up on a page and thus produce more pages. In fact, the company that created the font, Century Gothic, still recommends Times New Roman or Arial for readability.
The same cautions when it comes to printing still apply. Preview your pages before printing them, duplex whenever possible, and for non-essential jobs, use draft mode. The AP also points out that the greenest way to save ink is not to print at all.
That philosophy is what drove Microsoft to make the switch to Calibri and Cambria as defaults in Microsoft Outlook and Word with the release of Office 2007. They theorized that the “more pleasing a font looks on the screen, the less tempted someone will be to print,” according to Simon Daniels, who works as a program manager for Microsoft's typography group.
