Computer, computer, on a desk, Who is the greenest of fonts all?

We are humans, with our own unique quirks. This quirkiness also exhibits itself in our typeset of preference. For instance, Garamond is my favourite since it is neat and very comfortable to read (and, indeed, I have experimented with all fonts on Word, including MT Extra and the various Wingdings)- admittedly, the Oxonian in me often shifts towards Perpetua. But a curiosity to know more about the fonts made me stumble against something else- green fonts!


So, these are those which use less ink and paper when printing, conditional on the font size used. There are quite a many contenders for the title of greenest font. Those suggested so far are Century Gothic (font size: 10) which is supposedly better than Ecofont (font size: 10) but loses out on the paper front since the font itself is wide. This is followed by Times New Roman (font size: 11), Calibri (11), Verdana (10), Arial (11), Sans serif (11), Trebuchet (11), Tahoma (11), and Franklin Gothic Medium (11). However, Matt Robinson and Tom Wrigglesworth identified Garamond as fitting the bill.

I conducted a little experiment using normal fonts (i.e unitalicised or not bold or too narrow/wide), all size 11, from MS Office 2007 - the purpose, after all, is to write/print something readable! I have deliberately included the ruler from MS Word so that you can judge its dimensions. I apologise for the rudimentary photo- this was made using Windows Paint since I no longer have access to Adobe Photoshop.

I await your thoughts!