Company Punches Holes in Font to Save Ink

Climate Change Environmental One 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.

by The Associated Press

Published: Mon, December 22, 2008 - 12:13 pm CST Last Updated: Mon, December 22, 2008 - 1:04 pm CST

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.

"It turns out that it's necessary to preserve the size and outline of letters to keep them readable," company co-founder Gerjon Zomer says.

He concedes the font isn't beautiful, but says it could be adequate for personal use or for internal use at a company.

Spranq offers the font free on its Web site. Zomer says his site saw a spike in traffic last week as word of the Ecofont began to spread. Much of the international traffic came from the United States.

He says that was kind of gratifying because "when you put something online you never know what to expect."

The company is inviting developers to improve the Ecofont further under a free, open-source model, and Zomer says Arabic and Hebrew versions are already under development.

You can download the Font here.

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DEW26M Says:

Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 4:33 pm

Now dats a good font der pa’pa’ !! I downloaded it, sucks it only has sizes 12,18,24,36,48,72 though :( !

bobcat Says:

Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 4:27 pm

Yep, my “fur” tree is synthetic. lol…

KxVicious Says:

Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 4:14 pm

Your artificial Christmas tree, I hope.
I like to scream “FIR IS MURDER” out the window while driving by Christmas tree farms.

bobcat Says:

Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 4:11 pm

I appreciate that but I rarely use my printer. I do hope the newspapers and magazine publishers start using the new font or do away with them completely because they’re such a waste of paper. I should go hug my tree now.

David Rencher Says:

Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 3:52 pm

bobcat,
Our Printer friendly page for articles now uses this font if you have it installed.

bobcat Says:

Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 3:35 pm

No, but this article has been printed in several news papers and if you multiply that by the number of their subscribers that’s a hell of a lot of ink.

KxVicious Says:

Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 2:56 pm

Bob, do you print out everything you read on the Internet?

I’m downloading the font. I’m going to use it for the “novelty factor”

bobcat Says:

Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 2:28 pm

It’s nice that they are trying to conserve ink but the funny thing is, how much ink was wasted world wide to print the story about saving ink?