College Says New E-mail Font Will Save Money

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Get this…a Wisconsin college has decided to save money by switching e-mail fonts. Yes, you read that correctly, I said “by switching e-mail fonts.”

It says that while the change sounds minor, it will save money on ink when students print e-mails in the new font. That could add up to real savings, since the cost of printer ink works out to about $10,000 per gallon.
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I read about a year ago that some tech school developed a porous font with pores invisible to the naked eye. The fonts are as readable as any other fonts. The advantage to those porous font is that printers save ink because they're not printing the pores.

I don't think I'm explaining it clearly enough, but this actually works in the long run.
 
Azhar said:
I read about a year ago that some tech school developed a porous font with pores invisible to the naked eye. The fonts are as readable as any other fonts. The advantage to those porous font is that printers save ink because they're not printing the pores.

I don't think I'm explaining it clearly enough, but this actually works in the long run.
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Nope, I'm pretty sure you're right on. I read about something like that the other day, and the font was called EcoFont.
 
Azhar said:
I read about a year ago that some tech school developed a porous font with pores invisible to the naked eye. The fonts are as readable as any other fonts. The advantage to those porous font is that printers save ink because they're not printing the pores.

I don't think I'm explaining it clearly enough, but this actually works in the long run.
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The porous font sounds like a smart idea

Once people were aware that the porous font was in use, would the most common statement be "that email's content couldn't hold water?" or something like that :D
 
It is called eco-font. While a novel idea it is not without sacrifice. It is analogous to printing in draft mode. I've tried it but switched back because the text wasn't dark enough...
 
tgabe213 said:
Who prints emails anyway?
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qtf, my boss is obsessed with printing things and having physical copy on hand for data entry (which is understandable), but the cost could completely taken out if we purchased second monitors for our works stations and we would see the saving in a few months.
 
Azhar said:
I read about a year ago that some tech school developed a porous font with pores invisible to the naked eye. The fonts are as readable as any other fonts. The advantage to those porous font is that printers save ink because they're not printing the pores.

I don't think I'm explaining it clearly enough, but this actually works in the long run.
Click to expand...

FWIW, burger patties at most local fast food chains have that same 'feature'. Developed by White Castle cooks back in the 50's they discovered that patties with holes in them cook faster and the cooking process closes the holes.
 
Get people to print less and they'll save a lot more money than a font change can accomplish. Assuming they can get people to print less.
 
jnmunsey said:
It is called eco-font. While a novel idea it is not without sacrifice. It is analogous to printing in draft mode. I've tried it but switched back because the text wasn't dark enough...
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I was wondering that very thing. Like others have said, good idea for printing random everyday stuff, but when quality matters it doesn't seem like it would be sufficient.
 
You guys are overlooking the fact that this is a college. People print their homework or reports to turn in. In environments like this, Eco-font (God, I hate using the word Eco) really does go a long ways.
 
I would've questioned their intelligence if they spent a lot of money to develop or buy a special font. However, all they did was change the default font from Arial to Century Gothic. Potentially saving money while spending nothing sounds like a good idea to me.
 
Wow $10,000/gallon! I should get into the printer ink business and make my own ink! Wait a minute, people have tried that before and ended up being sued into oblivion. Yay for free market competition! :rolleyes:
 
My company's templates use a dark grey font colour for marketing materials, another tactic that can be exploited using e-mail defaults. No special font required.

[I just wanted an excuse to use Canadian spelling twice in one sentence.]
 
srangara said:
My company's templates use a dark grey font colour for marketing materials, another tactic that can be exploited using e-mail defaults. No special font required.

[I just wanted an excuse to use Canadian spelling twice in one sentence.]
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But the extra u's cost ink!
 
jnmunsey said:
It is called eco-font. While a novel idea it is not without sacrifice. It is analogous to printing in draft mode. I've tried it but switched back because the text wasn't dark enough...
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Ecofont has relatively large holes. There are other "green" fonts out there that use smaller holes. They don't save as much ink or toner, but people usually don't notice you are using them without breaking out a magnifying glass.
 
ecofont has been known to use the same amount of ink, cause eye strain and other issues.

i'm a uw-milwaukee lumni... what our school did was:
get rid of free printing
charge 20$ for unlimited printing
get rid of 20$ unlimited printing
charge 20 cents a page and say it costs 20-50 cents per toner printed page.

thieves: they also allowed our school board (ran by students) to steal hundreds of thousands of dollars..moving funds to fake bank accounts in their own name. and not press charges.

go uw-system.

oh also our tuition went up 50% in 7 years, yet the yuppies in cali complain (and still pay lower tuition especially when comparing costs of living)
 
jroe52 said:
ecofont has been known to use the same amount of ink, cause eye strain and other issues.

i'm a uw-milwaukee lumni... what our school did was:
get rid of free printing
charge 20$ for unlimited printing
get rid of 20$ unlimited printing
charge 20 cents a page and say it costs 20-50 cents per toner printed page.

thieves: they also allowed our school board (ran by students) to steal hundreds of thousands of dollars..moving funds to fake bank accounts in their own name. and not press charges.

go uw-system.

oh also our tuition went up 50% in 7 years, yet the yuppies in cali complain (and still pay lower tuition especially when comparing costs of living)
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Yeah it's all the printer company's fault your tuition went up 50%. There's nothing else in the entire school that would be the cause of the inflation. :rolleyes:

Use caps once in awhile college-boy.
 
They should make the font colored green while they're at it. :cool:

A coworker prints out many of his e-mails, so maybe we should use this font when writing to him.
 
jroe52 said:
ecofont has been known to use the same amount of ink, cause eye strain and other issues.

i'm a uw-milwaukee lumni... what our school did was:
get rid of free printing
charge 20$ for unlimited printing
get rid of 20$ unlimited printing
charge 20 cents a page and say it costs 20-50 cents per toner printed page.

thieves: they also allowed our school board (ran by students) to steal hundreds of thousands of dollars..moving funds to fake bank accounts in their own name. and not press charges.

go uw-system.

oh also our tuition went up 50% in 7 years, yet the yuppies in cali complain (and still pay lower tuition especially when comparing costs of living)
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Printing is $.06/page now and I think $.10/page on color printers. Same price across campus.
 
Azhar said:
Yeah it's all the printer company's fault your tuition went up 50%. There's nothing else in the entire school that would be the cause of the inflation. :rolleyes:

Use caps once in awhile college-boy.
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You have your cause and effect backwards
 
niconx said:
Wow $10,000/gallon! I should get into the printer ink business and make my own ink! Wait a minute, people have tried that before and ended up being sued into oblivion. Yay for free market competition! :rolleyes:
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Actually, plenty of companies sell ink. Some companies actually will sell you a chipped cartridge too. It thinks it is always full, so all you do is refill it.(pretty sure that is not cool in the US) But ink, as long as it is your formulation, you should be fine.

Also, I don't know how many of you have looked into the workings of your standard ink jet printer. Every time they do a head clean, They dump more ink into the catch well than you can use in 100 pages. Some of these printers do this about three times an hour. If they bought laser printers like anyone who has a friggin brain, they wouldn't be in this boat in the first place. Lets face it, no one needs to be printing color e-mail. I could understand the need to be able to print in color sometimes, but at that scale, even the pricey color laser printers start to look attractive.

If this professor was smart he would have setup an ink purge recovery system like the Ink jet direct resist PCB guys on CNC zone. In fact, by not knowing that this is the biggest ink waste on a ink jet printer, they guy has pretty much sealed his fate as a moron to me. If he solved the ink dump problem he would save hundreds times more than just changing the font.

I am sure that there is no need to dump a quarter of the available ink just to make sure the print head is clean. No one has anything to say to the printer manufacturers either. They will continue to rape you happily until this becomes common knowledge. Then they will say they developed a new system that purges very little ink. They will call it green tech or some stupid bullshit, and then all of you will run out to buy one.

I know, I know, why don't I just shoot myself right? Well I am too stubborn for that.;)
 
and the 10k per gallon is a BIT off... it's more like 2700 dollars a gallon (the price of a fully loaded gaming system on craigslist) but still....
 
tgabe213 said:
Who prints emails anyway?
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what? almost everyone at work. i'm the only one in my department of about 8 people who actually puts documents side by side for quick comparision, uses excel with lookup functions to compare data instead of printing (of course without setting the margins properly so you can waste three extra sheets of paper) and do manual checks etc. one person even prints the confirmations that someone read the mail. and then there's people who print something, look at it for less than three seconds and throw it away. look at the fucking screen and read from there damnit, no need to waste resources.
 
I have not had a printer in my house since I graduated college 8 years ago. Of course that is my house, at work I have several printers that I have to use on a regular basis for invoicing and archiving.
 
temujin987 said:
what? almost everyone at work. i'm the only one in my department of about 8 people who actually puts documents side by side for quick comparision, uses excel with lookup functions to compare data instead of printing (of course without setting the margins properly so you can waste three extra sheets of paper) and do manual checks etc. one person even prints the confirmations that someone read the mail. and then there's people who print something, look at it for less than three seconds and throw it away. look at the fucking screen and read from there damnit, no need to waste resources.
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That's all a huge waste. There are definitely occurances where I can see printing an email being useful. But on a college campus? The students who are growing up in a digital age, what are you printing that the costs are that high? This school should just charge the students to print like mine does (another UW school). $.06 per page. $1 lasts me a LONG TIME, and then you don't get people printing meaningless shit.
 
I'm a current student, taking English and German, both of which require turning in writing assignments. One class uses campus email to turn in assignments, the other uses turnitin.com (for plagarism checking). I use my multifunction laser to scan documents and print shipping labels more than I use it for school. All they need to do is change their methods.
 
My school charges 4 cents a print so it's not that big of a deal. Sure it adds up when you print alot but the school is hugely pro-internet based so they put huge emphasis to sending your crap to your professor via email. There are some professors I know that are still old school but it's not that big of a deal. Final papers however are a completely different story. Makes it alot easier for our professors to grade and process out as quick as possible HOWEVER students do send an email for backups just in case the professor loses it. That way the professors can't use the excuse that they never got it.
 
Instead they should just outlaw physical copies of term papers and make it e-mail only, that will cut out a ton of wasted paper and resources, and any university professor who doesn't use e-mail or internet resources should retire
 
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