A good way to save printer ink using optimization is to remove elements that are not needed in a printout. A user who wants to print out an article on a website might not need the menus, advertisements and comments that go along with it on the website. The second option comes down to specifying a print quality and font.

Ecofont has been designed for this exact purpose. Its nature does not make it applicable for all printouts but should be fine for internal printouts. The font makes use of a very obvious observation which centers around the idea that a font with less visible areas requires less ink. Ecofont therefor is a font with holes. This holes can save up to 20% of the usual amount of ink needed to print pages with a normal font.

It should be pretty obvious that this font is usually not one that should be used to print out important papers. Ecofont is offered as a free download at the creator’s website.

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Not so with Font Friend, a bookmarklet that simplifies the font selection process greatly. A click on the bookmarklet on any website will display it in an overlay in the lower left corner of the browser window. The font selector can be used to change various characteristics of the fonts used on a website. The options are divided into font family, font variant, font weight, text transform and a html element selector.

The html element selector defines the elements on the page that will be affected by the font change. Included are headline tags, body, paragraphs and the option to select a custom element.

The font family offers a selection of 23 different font families including the popular families arial, verdana, times new roman and georgia. Font variants can further change the appearance of the fonts on the active website.

Webmasters who are currently testing various fonts for their website might want to check out the bookmarklet which can be simply added to the bookmarks and executed by left-clicking it on the right website.

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Private characters are symbols which only work on machine on which they’re installed and correctly allocated. This may be useful if like a company logos or foreign script have to be frequently included into documents, and I expect it is more efficient than adding many images.

eudcedit.exe has minimal tools (a few simple shapes, a pencil, a brush and an eraser!), but it does allow a private character to be created in a fairly simplistic manner.

To use Private Character Editor, go to run and enter ‘eudcedit.exe’. Once it is open, you have to find an empty code point (an unused Unicode character) to use. Then, it is quite self-explanatory. After the character has been saved, to insert it, use Character Map.

Some virus scanners highlight this file as a trojan, but it comes with Windows so that is fairly unlikely.

The University of Heidelberg has a graphical tutorial on eudcedit.exe.

It is definitely worth noting that any characters you make on Private Character Editor will not work on any other computers, but it may still be useful should a symbol frequently be used.

(via Download Squad)

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