The right font can save you money

Psst...want to save some money on printing? Try Century Gothic.

Hit by the high prices of inkjet and toner cartridges, we're all looking for ways to shave some bucks off the cost of printing. New data from Printer.com found that because different fonts use different amounts of ink to print, using the right font could save you as much as 31 percent off your inkjet and toner cartridge expenses.

Printer.com, a Dutch company that compares printers and their costs, recently put its theory to the test. The company set up two printers--a Canon inkjet and a Brother laser printer--to see how much money could be saved by using different fonts. Both printers were left at their default settings of 600x600 dots per inch.

Using the default Arial font as a baseline, Printer.com changed to different fonts as it put the printers through their paces. The winner: Century Gothic, which delivered a 31 percent savings in printing costs over Arial.

On a dollar basis, the company projected that the average person printing around 25 pages a week would save $20 a year by using Century Gothic for all documents. A business or heavy-duty user printing 250 pages per week would save around $80 for the year. And large companies with multiple printers could potentially save hundreds of dollars a year.

As a thin and light font, Century Gothic managed to beat out Econfont, which was specifically created to cut costs by spewing out less ink. But if Century Gothic doesn't look like the right style for your documents, third place and always popular Times Roman could also help ease your printing budget, according to Printer.com's results.

To conduct its tests, Printer.com switched among the 10 most frequently used fonts and chose a font size of 10 or 11. To better determine the coverage of each font, the company printed documents saved as PDF files and used a software program called Apfill to calculate that coverage.