Comments on: Printing Costs: Does Font Choice Make a Difference?

By: Russell

Russell — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 14:55:57 +0000

When I mentioned this to my Graphic Designer wife she pointed out that the ‘x’ height of Century Gothic is higher that Times. That means that it is visually a larger font despite having the same Point size which is based on the length of the ascenders and descenders.

So, to make the test more ‘real-world’ one would have to adjust each font’s Point size so that they are all visually the same size and this provide the same readability.

Russell

By: Russell

Russell — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 14:50:51 +0000

Oops.. I see that the above test did try to compensate for the relative “x” heights. Though I think 10pt Century Gothic looks more like 12pt Times (11pt Times is still visually smaller)

I came here from a link on the Ecofont site where they display a comparison of fonts all at 10pt which is what generated the initial reaction.

Russell

By: Russell

Russell — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 14:39:37 +0000

When I mentioned this to my Graphic Designer wife she suggested that the test was somewhat unfair. She pointed out that the ‘x’ height of Century Gothic is higher that Times. That means that it is visually a larger font despite having the same Point size which is based on the length of the ascenders and descenders.

To make text readable she will usually choose a larger point size of Times vs Century Gothic. In real life practice the amount of text that fits on a page will be not be that different when seeking similar readability. Point size does not often represent the visual size of a font and needs to be adjusted to achieve the same visual size. One exception to this would be when using compressed versions of the same typeface.

So, to make the test more ‘real-world’ one would have to adjust each font’s Point size so that they are all visually the same size and this provide the same readability.

Russell

By: ink toner

ink toner — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 08:20:04 +0000

This is a very informative and useful article. Thank you for sharing this information

By: Toner

Toner — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 04:14:38 +0000

Century Gothic is a nice font–clean and easy to read. If it is going to help save on printing, then I am going to go for this tip. Thanks for sharing!

By: Richmonde

Richmonde — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 08:02:59 +0000

Does it save on disk space too?

By: Sean In Carlsbad

Sean In Carlsbad — Thu, 20 May 2010 01:23:23 +0000

Has anyone bothered to do a test with ALL fonts in a uniform point size?

I would, specifically, like to know how Arial 10 is vs. Century Gothic 10… Not 11 vs 10 like in the chart.

By: tom

tom — Wed, 19 May 2010 19:07:49 +0000

i don’t think people or businesses have the mind set to start changing fonts around.

the simplest solution is to use toner/ink saving software like ink saver or PretonSaver.

it will save up to 70% of your toner and ink usage, i use pretonsaver.

i don’t know about ink saver, but pretonsaver has a free trial.

By: Chris

Chris — Thu, 06 May 2010 20:07:08 +0000

Please be sure to look at the cost of ink on the extra pages that will print for some fonts in Phase 2 of your testing.

I’m not sure it was clearly stated in the comments above. Let’s take the example of 140 pages of Arial being 150 pages in Century Gothic. If I read it right, 140 pages of Century Gothic at 3.45% coverage is cheaper than 140 pages of Arial at 5%. But I had to print an extra 10 pages. That is 10/140 more pages/ink. The percentage to use for cost savings, if I’m doing this right, is 3.45 + 3.45 * 10 / 140, or 3.45 + .25 or 3.7%. That makes it more like $49.68 for the year.

Thus I don’t think you can ignore this in order to get accurate meaningful results.

thanks,

chris

By: KB

KB — Thu, 06 May 2010 16:21:44 +0000

Interesting study, lots of great comments, can’t wait for the new study! As for Ecofont…anyone have any idea how shooting holes in fonts will affect documents that have to be machine read or 2d barcodes?