A lot of parents teaching from public domain materials print out the texts and have them bound into notebooks for their children. When using a curriculum that offers a week by week reading list, parents may even opt to print all of the week’s (or school day’s) readings and lessons grouped together, to make it easy to study on the go.
Other parents may purchase books but will create their own worksheets to supplement them, especially sheets for math, spelling or copywork/penmanship.
All of this printing we do costs money. In paper and electricity, and also in ink. There are a number of ways to save on printing supplies, but there is always room for improvement. Well, here’s a painless improvement: change your font!
What, change my font? Really? Yes, it turns out that the default font in many programs (Arial) uses more ink than other commonly used fonts. If you’d like to look at the gorey details, check out this entry at the Printer.com blog. The bottom line? Changing over to Times Roman or Century Gothic should save the average small business or home user between $20 – $80 a year in ink.
Another font that rated well in the testing was EcoFont, developed by Dutch company SPRANQ and offered as a free, open source download. The concept of the font is simple: little holes in each letter mean that it takes less ink to print it. Used at the recommended font size of 9 or 10, the holes don’t show at all. Savings from EcoFont were slightly better than those with Times, but not quite as good as those obtained using Century Gothic.
What does the font look like? I have prepared a sheet of text for you to see, using text from the EcoFont page at SPRANQ. The body of the text uses the recommended font size of 9 (the Printer.com test used the slightly larger 10, as it compared in size to the other fonts rated.) Both the header and footer use font size 12, in bold face. At the top of the sample is the EcoFont graphic on which you can see the “eco” part written as though magnified, with the little holes in it. You can click on the image to see it at full size.
Although I find the text quite legible at a font size of 9, I might opt for font size 10 or 11 for everyday purposes, and perhaps larger for younger children or people with vision difficulties. I haven’t tried printing it yet, but I was able to go up to a font size of 13 (22 is bold) before I could make out the holes in the letters on-screen. I imagine your mileage will vary, according to your computer display and visual acuity. The best test is printing up a sample of some text you know you’ll be using.
This work was created by Ruby of Freehold 2, and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada License.
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Tags: EcoFont, environmental concerns, homeschooling costs, printing costs, save on ink, SPRANQ
Neat-o! I’ve downloaded it and will install soon.
Jimmie,
Overall, you will likely notice the on-screen display is pale when you use EcoFont 9 or 10 for projects. I haven’t completed anything with it for printing yet, but suspect the difference shows more on-screen than on the printed page. Two years ago I downloaded some homeschooling texts that were formatted using a dark grey colour instead of black, with the same goal of saving ink. The difference was there on-screen but I didn’t find it significant in hard copy, particularly on lightweight multi-purpose paper.
Thanks for leaving your link! I enjoyed your site :)
Cheers,
Ruby
Interesting! Another way to help save $ is to set your default printer settings for draft print, black ink only. I use this setting for 99% of all my printouts, find it very readable, and get a lot more use out of the printer cartridge, thus being one of those easy ways to save money + :)
Kaye – @SandwichINK´s last blog ..Five Twin Tips for Grandparents
Simple and effective cost saving on ink. I like the idea of eco friendly printing, escpecially if it helps the environment.