Our review of Ecofont software, which puts holes on fonts to save on ink.

The draft mode on most printers is so hard to read that its practically useless. Ecofont solves this problem - its very legable, much much better than printers' draft mode, and saves significantly on ink. Great for internal use, not good enough for final copies and presentations.

According to our calculations, it uses 40% less ink than regular fonts.

(Could it be that printer manufacturers make draft mode so bad because they don't want you to save ink? Just sayin')

You can only use Ecofont Software in MS Word and Outlook on a PC only - no other software at this time.

Theres no home version yet - its only sold to companies with 10 or more employees.

Its only sold to companies with 10 or more workstations,.

A home version is planned for the near future.

Installation and usability were not as good as we would like. It took me the better part of an hour to install it and figure out how to use it. A cryptic error message came up at one point.

Still, I liked it a lot. I think any company doing a lot of printing for internal use should consider using it. Law firms, for example.

If youre a home user, and would like to try Ecofont, you can download the Ecofont Sans Vera font. Its a holy version of a font that looks similar to Verdana. It wont save you any ink versus more common fonts like Ariel since the font its based on is itself fairly ink-hungry. Its free though. If you actually want to save money, youll have to wait for the Ecofont home version to come out.