Change Your Font. Save Money.

Here's a tip for saving money: change your fonts. Changing the font in documents you print and copy can save you about, well, $20 a year. Basically, different fonts require different amounts of ink and printing in one verses the other could have you changing your ink cartridges less often.

At the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, the coordinator of information-technology user support, Diane Blohowiak asked faculty and stuff to use Century Gothic font as much as possible, and the school is even going to change its email system so it defaults to the font. Blohowiak tells the AP that she has received positive feedback about the move. The school goes through about $100,000 worth of ink cartridges each year and she expects they can save anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000 just by making the switch.

The data comes from Printer.com, who tested various fonts to figure out which ones were the most budget-friendly. Century Gothic and Times New Roman were the the best (Century Gothic uses about 30% less ink than Arial, which is what many products use), followed by Calibri, Verdana, Arial, Sans Serif, Trebuchet, Tahoma and Franklin Gothic Medium.

In general, any font with "narrow" or "light" in its name, is gonna be better than than anything that says "bold" or "black." The thickness of the lines make all the difference. Seif fonts tend to use less ink than a "sans serif" font.

However, the AP reports that just because this practice is budget-friendly, doesn't mean it's environment-friendly. Centurgy Gothic happens to be wider than Arial, and therefore, uses more paper to print a document. Allan Haley of Monotype Imaging Inc., which developed Century Gothic fonts says the print was not designed for full text documents, but instead for small blocks or titles and headlines. Haley said he would suggest people use Arial or Times New Roman despite the possibility of saving money.

But if you'd rather save the Earth instead of your wallet, the best way to do that is to not print at all. Microsoft is working to encourage that with the fonts it uses in Outlook and Word. Simon Daniels, the program manager for Microsoft's typography group, told the AP that fonts that look more appealing on screen will make it less tempting for users to print a document. As a matter of fact, according to Daniels, that's why Microsoft changed its default fonts in Office 2007; Arial and Times New Roman became Calibri and Cambria.

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