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.

But what’s so special about Greenprint which I discovered at the Download Squad ? Greenprint gives you options before you start the print job. It displays all pages and determines those that are most likely not needed, this can be for instance pages with just a footer which would be a waste of ink. Besides that users can remove certain elements from pages that do get printed by right-clicking those pages and selecting one of the three available options to remove certain elements on the page.

Elements that can be removed are images, text and the whole page much like a basic version of the Firefox extension Aardvark. The advantage of Greenprint is that it is available in all types of applications because it installs itself as a virtual printer, the disadvantage is that you can’t select single elements on a page and remove only those. It’s all or nothing. Documents can also be saved instead of printed using Greenprint.

Statistics displays how many pages you did not print because of Greenprint and how many money has been saved because of this measure. The companies estimation is that individuals can save $90 per year if they do use Greenprint continuously. The figure seems a bit high because their estimation is that 1400 pages will not be printed because of Greenprint which would mean that a user would not print 4 pages per day. Maybe it’s aimed at companies where this figure becomes more likely.