Can You Cut Costs With Your Font?

In this day and age, as printer costs continue to rise, small offices and companies are turning to increasingly odd methods to shave their expenses down. Some implement the usual office-wide strategies of double-sided printing and secure login codes to use the printer . Other offices have gone into more drastic areas, implementing a paper-free office or equipping every employee with a portable USB drive . Here's a much simpler solution: change your font and save up to 31% on ink costs. Wow, really ?

The most popular font type these days is Arial . A study conducted by blog.printer.com, however, deduces that it's certainly not the most economical. To ensure a control, 10 fonts were compared, each one printing out the same text. A Canon Pixma MP210 was used to represent the printer an average home user would own and the Brother HL-2140 was used to represent the printer an average business user would own .

Identical pages were printed in all 10 fonts . The documents were turned into .pdf documents and scanned by the application Apfill, which calculated the total ink coverage of each page.

In the end, the total ink coverage for each font given identical text was compared, and a clear winner was established, one that used the absolute least amount of ink . With the assumption of 25 pages/week a home user could save $20/year in ink costs just by switching to Century Gothic. Normal business use (estimated to be around 250 pages/week) would result in $80 yearly savings with the switch to Century Gothic .

For businesses printing more than 250 pages a week or a businesses with multiple printers on-site, this cost savings could grow even higher .

Now we need to now, which font is the thriftiest?? Which font had the least page coverage while remaining acceptably readable?

And now, ladies and gentlemen, your #1 font is....Century Gothic!. Verdana came in at #5 and Times New Roman was #3, to give an idea of comparison. Arial itself was ranked #6 in the list of 10 fonts tested for ink usage .
Now the next time you're looking to cut ink and printing costs, try something simple: Try changing your font .
Have a peek at the rest of the blog.printer.com article on their website, where you can see numbers and rankings for all ten of the tested fonts.