An Earth-Friendly Font?

We've come a long way since the dot-matrix printer – with all its buzzes and zips and bzzt-bzzts. Damn 20 years goes by fast, and to think at one time that that stuff was high-tech, state of the art equipment.

These days, we enjoy the fantastic capability of reproducing lab-quality photo prints in the comfort of our home office within nanoseconds. But for these added luxuries, can you think of anyone who enjoys throwing down an obscene $60-plus for a new pair of ink cartridges each time the printer runs dry?

But lo, a Dutch typeface company has produced a new font that they promise will save users 20 percent in ink consumption. EcoFont, which looks a lot like Arial, is based on the Vera Sans font, an Open Source lettering, and it's available for free download at the EcoFont website.

What makes it unique is that each letter (as shown in the illustration above) is pierced with very small holes, thus reducing the amount of ink used during printing tasks. Of course it's possible to cut down on ink consumption by merely setting your ink preferences to "draft" mode when printing a document, but the difference is that with EcoFont, the holes are unnoticeable when printed at a 12-point or smaller font setting. Meaning the lettering appears to be bold black, unlike the ghostly transparency of lettering achieved in draft mode.

Oh, and EcoFont is available in both home and professional editions and many languages.

Let's face it, printers drink ink like SUVs suck down gasoline. As a new generation of typeface, by all appearances EcoFont is a conversion kit that will take that ink-guzzling Hummer sitting in your office and turn it into a fuel-nurturing Prius.

Images courtesy EcoFont.