An innovative font system from the Netherlands now enables computer users to print sustainably and lessen their environmental impact by cutting their consumption of ink and toner by up to 25%.
Reduced ink consumption can also result in significant financial savings, with Ecofont’s manufacturer, the Dutch marketing firm Spranq, claiming that a company with 5,000 employees could save over £100,000 a year on its printing costs.
The ‘Ecofont’ system is a subscription package that ‘drills holes’ in your normal fontface, eliminating between 20-25% of the ink from your printout by leaving tiny, circular unprinted areas peppered over the letters and characters you use. As the holes are smaller than the eye can see, this has no affect on the legibility of your text.
You can punch environmentally-friendly holes in your favourite font for €15, which provides you with a 3-year licenced download of your font’s eco-variation.
Try before you buy
You can also download a trial ecofont to try the system out. The free-of-charge single font, based on the Bitstream Vera typeface, is available at the website ecofont.eu.
The ideal point sizes for using ecofonts is 10-11 point, roughly the size used in most newspapers and magazines. For lettering larger than this (headlines and larger print) Ecofont is unsuitable, as the tiny holes in the font become visible. In this case, the software senses that the font is too large, and does not add the holes.
Developments Ecofont
The free Ecofont typeface has been developed into Ecofont printing software with which you can print with the font of your choice and print that same font with holes. So now there is Arial, Verdana, Times New Roman, etcetera with holes.
Another big advantage is that the font invisibly gets converted on the background when clicked on the Ecofont-printbutton. So on screen you see the font you always see and only the print contains the (same font with) holes.
Besides that the Ecofont Free was hand made; for the Ecofont software they programmed a solution which puts the holes in the best place of every character. So the readability is maximum.