Spotted recently on Slashdot: Hardware: New Font Uses Holes To Cut Ink Use.
Posted by timothy on Wednesday December 17, @04:38PM
from the more-you-take-away dept.
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.
It is a pretty nifty idea, definitely outside the box. The concept raised a few questions in my mind. How accessible is it? How much is readability reduced?
So I have downloaded the font. After a few minutes I realizsd that it needed to go into Window’s Font folder. Here is a sample of the font at different sizes.
The Ecofont
In order to do a proper comparison, I needed to see it side by side with another font. So here is a head-to-head with Times New Roman. The fonts sizes run from 12 to 32. As you can see below, at smaller font sizes the differences are minimal. At larger sizes, the font loses its sharp contrast with the background. For visually impaired users, Ecofont is not a good screen font.
Ecofont vs. Times New Roman
How fonts look on the monitor does not always translate to paper. So I also printed some text in both Ecofont and Times New Roman. I found that Ecofont’s readability did not degrade so much with larger font sizes on paper as it did on screen.
For the environmentally-conscious visually impaired, the verdict is split. Work with a regular font on screen, but change the font to Ecofont to print drafts. An easy way to save some ink and save your eyes.
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