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.

Print Friendly is a web based service that is available on their main website, as a bookmarklet and for website owners as a script to put on their websites directly. Print Friendly will basically remove certain elements like advertisement by default from the website. By doing this it reduces the printer ink needed to print the website. More important than that is probably the option to remove additional elements before sending the rest of the document to the printer.

This makes it possible to remove additional unwanted elements such as tags or images from the document before printing it. Print Friendly offers an option to automatically remove all images from the document to make things easier if a document contains many of them. It also features an undo function in case the user wants to go back to a previous state.

The optimized document can then be printed or turned into a pdf at the Print Friendly website. The bookmarklet makes it easier to use the service while surfing the Internet as it will automatically load the active website in the Print Friendly website.

Print Friendly might come handy in situations where other tools or extensions that can remove elements from websites before printing are not available.

If you regularly print out websites or documents you must have noticed that they do not fit perfectly on paper all the time. Websites are usually to large to fit correctly on paper which will move some elements – usually those on the right side that do not fit on the print – to a second paper. This could leave you with menus that will be printed on their own paper, something that is not normally needed at all.

FinePrint offers ways to deal with those pages and a few additional features that make it an interesting software for everyone who prints out those documents regularly.

Installation of FinePrint should go through without problems. It adds itself as a virtual printer to the computer system suggesting to the user that it should be set as the default printer on the system. Either way print jobs can then be send to the software application where they will be listed in the main interface.

You can send multiple print jobs to FinePrint and the software will display them all in its interface. One of the major features of the software is to remove pages that are not needed in the printout. You can flip through the pages and zoom in on them to find out if a page is needed or not. Pages that are not needed can be removed easily with the click of the button.

FinePrint will display the paper savings in the status bar which should give you an indication of its effectiveness.

Removing papers from a print job is one thing, combining pages on one paper is another. The printing software can print 1,2,4 or 8 sheets of the print job on a single sheet. It can also print them double-sided if the printer is supporting that feature. Printing 8 pages on one sheet is good for eagle-eye users or archiving purposes.

Additional options are available to save computer ink. Graphics can be removed from the printouts and the quality can be set to grayscale to use only black ink when printing. You can define borders, margins and bindings and also add stamps (confidential, proof, internal use etc) to the papers.

If the document is ready for printing you can simply send it to one of the connected printers by pressing the printer button in the FinePrint interface.

The only thing that is missing is the ability to remove or move objects on a page as well. Other than that is is a great application to save paper. Could be very handy in office or for users who regularly print out websites and other documents.

We are giving away five FinePrint licenses to lucky readers. If you want to win a copy leave a comment and tell us how many trees you would save with this software ;)