Hey 👋
I made Ecofonts, a web app that optimizes fonts to use less ink when you print.
Ink-saving fonts aren't new, Ryman Eco, Ecofont and others proved the idea years ago. But they all had the same catch: to save ink you had to switch to their specific font. If you liked your typeface, or you were printing a document someone else made, you were out of luck. Ecofonts flips that around, you keep whatever font you want and print whatever file you have, and it does the ink-saving for you with zero effort.
What you can drop in:
.pdf — a whole document
.ttf, .otf, .woff, .woff2 — individual fonts
.zip — a batch of fonts (folder structure preserved)
👉 And if you just drop a PDF, that's basically the whole flow — no need to know or care what fonts are inside. It finds them all, optimizes them, and hands you back a print-ready document. Pick your intensity, done.
What it does: it takes the inside of every glyph and subtracts a fine grid of tiny vector holes: think of it like a honeycomb hidden inside each letter. At normal reading sizes you barely notice, but your printer lays down noticeably less ink. You pick an "Eco Intensity" (1–20%) and download the modified file.
How it works: the geometry is the fun part. Each glyph outline gets flattened to polygons, then a clipper library does the boolean ops, inset the shape by a minimum wall thickness so the holes never notch the letter's silhouette, intersect a staggered grid of octagonal holes with that interior, and subtract the result from the full glyph. The hole radius is solved from your intensity slider so the measured ink reduction actually tracks the percentage you picked. All of it runs in a Web Worker so the tab never freezes on heavy glyphs, and nothing ever leaves your browser: no uploads, no server, no accounts.
Keeps the original format and folder structure of whatever you put in on the way out.
It's free and open source. Would love feedback — especially on print results if anyone actually runs a page through their printer.
🔗 https://ecofonts.github.io · GitHub: github.com/ecofonts/ecofonts.github.io