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Dutch company punches holes in font to save ink

@ 2008/12/24

A Dutch company looking for ways to reduce the environmental costs of printing has developed a new font that it says cuts ink usage by about 15 percent.

In essence, the "Ecofont" has little holes in the letters.

Spranq, the Utrecht-based marketing and communications company that designed the font, struck on a Swiss-cheese design after failures with earlier experiments using thin letters and partial letters — like the stripes of a zebra.

Comment from Kougar @ 2008/12/25

Just find some hard data. Both personal and office paper consumption figures have grown since the 90's. The dawn of portable electronics has only led to an increase in copy paper consumption, not a decrease.

Comment from wutske @ 2008/12/25

I agree, paper isn't dead at all. During the 3 weeks I worked at the Indaver stock we printed over 300 pages ! Incomming products, outgoing products, stock counts, screenshots, emails, ... paper, paper, paper and even more paper

.
For a environment friendly waste processing facility they do waste quite some paper ! they could easily reduce the amount of paperwork if they'd used arial 10 instead of courier 10

Comment from jmke @ 2008/12/24

under what rock you do live Rutar?

printing is very much alive, no laptop or handheld replaces a good paper copy; you'd be surprised how much printjobs are send through our print servers each day

I think you're confusing "print news paper" with "printing"

Comment from Rutar @ 2008/12/24

that company is investing in dead tech, printing is becoming obsolete

Comment from jmke @ 2008/12/24

display on PC screen is really lousy with this font, but when you print a document, it does come out nicely, you really need to put look very closely to notice the holes.

testecofont.pdf is printed straight to PDF from Word, font size 8
testecofont2.pdf is scanned printout to PDF from printer; looks better in real life.
font size 9 matches font size 10 of Arial +/-

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