The Ink Efficiency of Common Typefaces | Hacker News Reader

The Ink Efficiency of Common Typefaces

matthewrobinson.co.uk

25 pointstragiclos13 comments

This might have been the worst possible way you could perform this experiment. What if he accidentally drew over the same line twice? What if there are uneven darknesses of the filled-in letters? What if one pen has a lower flow of ink than another? What if he left a gap somewhere?

Why not just use calculus to determine the area inside each of the letters?

While his approach is unlikely to be close to the true ink efficiency I give it points for a being a creative way of representing the relation.

I would guess they actually did this first (determine the area directly) so that they could judge how large to make their sample word. Their results look very nice and, notably, are scaled appropriately to a single ballpoint pen's worth of ink.

or maybe not. might have just turned out well!

Or draw them in memory and sum the pixels in (inverted) greyscale?

Now, What really needs to be done is to compare "Ink Efficiency" with "Legibility". I wonder if there are other factors which can be used to determine whether one font is "better" than another?

BTW, the ink efficiency is better determined using weighted average of distribution of letter frequency in language use over the alphabet and should be trivially determinable by parsing font files.

Sounds like an a valuable mini exploration project suitable for print media.

[EDIT]. Additionally, for display optimizations you need to maximize "Legibility", "Font Size" at various contrast ratios on screen. It would be interesting to be able to quantify an optimal "Font Face" and "Font Size" for various contrast ratios (screen power consumption) for mobile displays.

It seems to me that calling it "ink efficiency" is framing it in a way that ignores readability and legibility. The more common term for this is "font weight", which we already knew was independent of the pitch (size). It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that the more generally readable typefaces are in the middle of the group.

Yep, based on intuition it would definitely seems like fonts with similar font weights (assuming the same font size), would offer similar legibility. The real question is, given a choice of font and the requirement of printing a novel or HN front-page on a mobile device, how do you quantify the trade-offs between them, so that one can say, this saves 'X' amount of ink or power for the same legibility?

>I wonder if there are other factors which can be used to determine whether one font is "better" than another?

I can't find them, but a lot of studies were done on type legibility when Hoefler Frere-Jones redesigned the typeface for the US interstate signage system. They made a lot of interesting findings, such as a word with an inital cap followed by lowercase was more legible than all caps or all lowercase; or that lowercase 'L's are more easily read when they have a small hook at the bottom, as opposed to jut being a straight line.

I don't think it was H&FJ. http://clearviewhwy.com/, http://www.meekerdesigns.com/

Here's something that I am using (on Ubuntu FYI) - http://www.ecofont.eu/ecofont_en.html

This is the Spranq Eco Font . It's a TTF font, designed with holes (invisible to the naked eye) that saves printer ink ... they claim 20% lesser ink, I havent benchmarked my usage.

The ecofont Pro is a software (rather than a font) that punches holes into any font of your choice - dunno about its compatibility with Linux/OpenOffice, so havent tried it.

It's cool that somebody can actually draw different fonts by hand, but wouldn't it be fairly easy to make images of fonts at a large size and count the black pixels? That way you could get numbers.

I think this is more of a display of art than science, lining up the pens as a benchmark of a digital font modeled after an analog font - once made with ink. The journey of type.

Sweet, another reason not to use Comic Sans!

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