Last year, printer comparison website Printer.com did an experiment to determine if choosing a different default typeface could help cut printing costs. After testing several common fonts available for Microsoft Office, the site determined that Century Gothic actually saved the most ink or toner, enough to save a significant amount of money even in light use cases. The savings were enough to convince the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay to switch to Century Gothic for the bulk of its printing needs.

The school's IT department has asked staff and faculty to use Century Gothic whenever possible for printed documents. It is also setting up the e-mail system and computer labs to use Century Gothic as the default font. "The feedback we've gotten so far has been positive," Diane Blohowiak, coordinator of information-technology user support, told the Associated Press. "Century Gothic is very readable."

(We'll set aside aesthetic arguments for the sake of this article, but it's worth noting that Century Gothic's designer doesn't recommend the typeface for general text use.)

The school spends about $100,000 in ink every year, and Blohowiak believes that the change can save the university between $5,000 and $10,000. While the monetary savings are significant—ink generally costs more than paper, according to Blohowiak's research—some of the savings could be offset by greater paper usage. While Century Gothic's thin outlines use less ink than Times or Arial, the letters themselves are wider, and could result in some documents requiring more paper.

Another toner-friendly solution might come from a Dutch design company, which came up with the concept of an "Ecofont." The original Ecofont was a modified version of Bitstream's Vera Sans typeface, with tiny holes punched out of the strokes of the letters. Printed at common sizes below 12 points, the holes are generally too small to notice and use less ink to print. Printer.com's research showed that the original Ecofont itself saved almost as much ink as Century Gothic.

Ecofont saves toner by punching tiny holes in each letter, which isn't noticeable at common text sizes.

However, the designers have taken the idea one step further, and developed Ecofont software that will punch tiny holes in the type of any document you print, using whatever typeface you prefer. A narrower typeface which uses less paper can be combined with the ink savings of Ecofont for a combined savings of ink and paper (and extra green points, too).

Perhaps the best solution, however, is to just avoid hitting the print button altogether unless it is absolutely necessary. Much of our data exists in electronic form, and there is increasingly little reason to print those documents on paper. Mobile devices like smartphones, netbooks, or Apple's iPad can give on-the-go document access, and cloud services like Google Docs mean that the most up-to-date version is always available to anyone with network access.

And thanks to special font families designed for the screen (such as Microsoft's recent collection of ClearType fonts), onscreen reading is easier on the eyes than ever.