

The Ink Efficiency of Common Typefaces - tragiclos
http://www.matthewrobinson.co.uk/projects/measuring-type/

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ethan
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?

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amoeba
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.

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sax
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.

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ethan
>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.

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

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sandGorgon
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.

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sketerpot
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.

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drhodes
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.

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jluxenberg
Sweet, another reason not to use Comic Sans!

