HERE'S A LEGAL WAY TO PRINT MONEY : CHANGE THE FONT !

[Anonymous]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100406/ap_on_hi_te/us_tec_money_saving_fonts
HERE’S A LEGAL WAY TO PRINT MONEY :
CHANGE THE FONT !
MILWAUKEE – Here’s
a way you might save $20 this year: Change the font in the documents
you print.Because different fonts require different amounts of ink to
print, you could be buying new printer cartridges less often if you
wrote in, say, Century Gothic rather than Arial. Schools and businesses
could save thousands of dollars with font changes.

Data on the
subject from Printer.com, a Dutch company that evaluates printer
attributes, persuaded the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay to make a
switch. Diane Blohowiak, coordinator of information-technology user
support, has asked faculty and staff to use Century Gothic for all
printed documents. The school also plans to change its e-mail system so
it uses Century Gothic.”The feedback we’ve gotten so far has been
positive,” she said. “Century Gothic is very readable.”

The
school of 6,500 students spends about $100,000 per year on ink and toner
cartridges. Although students and staff can change the default font to
something more ink-intensive, Blohowiak said the university expects to
save $5,000 to $10,000 per year with the font switch.When Printer.com
tested popular fonts for their ink-friendly ways, Century Gothic and
Times New Roman topped the list. Calibri, Verdana, Arial and Sans Serif
were next, followed by Trebuchet, Tahoma and Franklin Gothic Medium.
Century Gothic uses about 30 percent less ink than Arial.The amount of
ink a font drains is mainly driven by the thickness of its lines. A font
with “narrow” or “light” in its name is usually better than its “bold”
or “black” counterpart, said Thom Brown, an ink researcher at
Hewlett-Packard Co., the world’s top maker of printers.Also, serif fonts
— those with short horizontal lines at the top and bottom of characters
— tend to use thinner lines and thus less ink than a “sans serif”
counterpart.

But while using less ink at home can help you buy
roughly one fewer printer cartridge each year, it’s not necessarily
better for the environment.That’s because some fonts that use less ink,
including Century Gothic, are also wider. A document that’s one page in
Arial could extend to a second page if printed in Century Gothic.
Blohowiak said her research suggests that ink comprises the main cost of
a printout, but the environmental costs of paper are probably
higher.”Maybe the individual characters use less ink, but if you’re
using more paper, that’s not so green, is it?” said Allan Haley,
director of “words and letters” at Monotype Imaging Inc. in Woburn,
Mass., which developed Century Gothic.

Also, Century Gothic was
designed for limited blocks of text such as titles and headlines, not
for full documents, said Haley, who describes fonts as his “children.”
Despite Printer.com’s research and UW-Green Bay’s experience, Haley said
he still recommends Times New Roman or Arial for their readability.The
standard advice for trimming printing expenses still applies: Print in
“draft mode,” if you can. Use both sides of a page and do a print
preview to make sure you’re not printing pages with useless text such as
a copyright line. Using an ink-saving font is just one more technique
to consider.

And the greenest way to save on ink is not to print
at all.
That’s the philosophy Microsoft Corp. said it uses in
deciding which fonts to include in its Outlook and Word applications.
The more pleasing a font looks on the screen, the less tempted someone
will be to print, said Simon Daniels, a program manager for Microsoft’s
typography group.That’s why the company changed its defaults in Office
2007 from Arial and Times New Roman to Calibri and Cambria, he
said.”We’re trying to move the threshold of when people hit the print
button,” he said.
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[Author]

April 11, 2010 at 5:36 PM