I know first hand that businesses want to cut down on the amount of ink that they use.
Ink is expensive. You can spend thousands of dollars on the stuff every month, especially if you have a big team.
Companies need to get the price of printer ink down. It’s imperative. The cost of ink made my company uncompetitive before I found out how to save money on it.
The Problem With Arial
Arial is one of the most popular fonts in the world, but it’s got a problem: it uses a lot of ink.
I couldn’t immediately see, however, that that was the case. After all, Arial looks about as generic as a font can be.
I soon saw, however, that Arial was burning through ink cartridges like there was no tomorrow. Something about it meant that my ink cartridges ran out faster than I wanted them to.
I began to wonder whether other fonts would let me keep costs down. Were there any?
Times New Roman
The problem with Arial is that the lines that make up the letters are all the same thickness.
When I took a close look at the font, I could see that the lines that made up each character were the same. They were the same number of pixels wide.
Then I compared it to Times New Roman and discovered something interesting. Times New Roman wasn’t like Arial at all. The width of the lines making up the characters varied a lot.
It occurred to me that this might help my printer situation. Times New Roman economized on ink by making some parts of letters skinnier. I was about to get about 27 percent more mileage from my cartridges.
Calibri
I then wondered where any other fonts would have a similar impact.
I soon came across Calibri. To the naked eye, Calibri looks almost identical to Arial. Like Arial, Calibri uses characters made of lines with regular width.
But there’s a crucial difference between the two fonts. Arial uses a “blocky” form that fills out a lot of space. Calibri, by contrast, rounds off the edge of characters at their extremities.
So, for instance, with Arial, a full stop is a square, but with Calibri, it’s a circle that fits inside the square.
I immediately knew, therefore, that I would get more economy from Calibri. If I draw a square and then a circle inside it, I can see that the circle is smaller. It would, therefore, use less ink.
Century Gothic
Century Gothic looks incredibly similar to both Calibri and Aria. However, like Calibri, it rounds off the ends of the letter.
Again, this means that you save on ink.
Some people don’t like using Times New Roman, considering it too formal, but you don’t have to use it to save ink. I saved loads shifting to friendly fonts like Calibri.
You can also save ink costs by using remanufactured ink cartridges. You can buy them online from YoYoink.com at a reduced price.