A recent development by a company called SPRANQ is "The Ecofont", which was based on a hunch of Colin Willems. This is what they say:
The prints we make for our 'daily use' not only use paper, but also ink. According to SPRANQ creative communications (Utrecht, The Netherlands) your ink cartridges could last longer. SPRANQ has therefore developed a new font: the Ecofont.
"After Dutch holey cheese, there now is a Dutch font with holes as well."Appealing ideas are often simple: how much of a letter can be removed while maintaining readability? After extensive testing with all kinds of shapes, the best results were achieved using small circles. After lots of late hours (and coffee) this resulted in a font that uses up to 20% less ink.
What absolute rubbish you might say. If you look at the font you can see that the addition of holes has made the font chunky... so why not just use a thinner font? You may also say that having holes in it does use slightly less ink than a font of the same thickness (which over thousands of sheets would make a difference); but no one in their right mind would use a font that chunky as main text - it's more of font for heading text which means it'd be used very little and the saving on ink would be negligible. However, the example on their site is not a true reflection of how it looks. I strongly recommend downloading it and trying it for yourself as it's not really as chunky as it looks. I applied it to a Word document I'm working on (I'll come back to this in a few months time with some news) and found the text still perfectly readable, and maybe even thinner than the old font at the same size. One thing I do wonder is how this compares to printing in draft mode, as old printers used to make the text quite similar to that when printing draft. Also, they're continuing development of the EcoFont which may mean further improvements to the font at some point or another.
Link: Download the EcoFont
