ecofont in LaTeX
Introduction
ecofont is a TrueType font developed by the netherlandees (more specificly by Spranq). Its aim’s to reduce the ink usage when documents are printed while maintaining the same readibility as the original font. After trying several concepts, they “deduced” that putting little holes inside the fonts does the trick. Now we’ve got a ttf file, which can be used considerably easily in some OS-es and maybe in OpenOffice, but gives a headache under LaTeX.
LaTeX and ttf
The main problem with tutorials on how to put the ecofont (or a ttf font) in LaTeX is, that they all begin with
ttf2afm -o ecofont.afm ecofont.ttf
and this gives a segmentation fault. When debbugging the code (and I did that) you discover, that the problem is in the format. ecofont references some table, which it does not contain and this gives ttf2afm a deadly stab.
fontforge
I understand people’s passion to develop fonts. But after a short while, you discover two things:
- That drawing the 26 letters of the english alphabet is not enough
- if you only redraw some letters, than your font will be inconsistent and inevitably ugly.
Maybe that’s why, when you run up fontforge (which appears to be an excellent font editor), you have a nostalgic feeling of DOS times. I ever wondered how difficult would it be to update the gui to qt? Anyhow, in the matters of engine, there is no missing feature, so you can export the ecofont.ttf to PostScript type 1 including all the neccessary complement files. In the end you create two more files:
t1ecofont.fd
\ProvidesFile{t1ecofont.fd}[ecofont]
\DeclareFontFamily{T1}{ecofont}{}
\DeclareFontShape{T1}{ecofont}{m}{n}{ <-> ecofont }{}
ttfonts.map
ecofont ecofont.ttf Encoding=ecofont.enc
and you’re done. My solution is here, so if you just want to use ecofont in LaTeX, download it and look at the example.
Caution
I am not convinced about the environment-friendliness of ecofont. Depending on where you read it they claim about 15-20% of ink save. The idea behind the design is, that if you have smaller surface, you save ink. Do you have smaller surface? It depends compared to what. If you compare ecofont to itself you may have this ratio, but if you compare it to the LaTeX standard cms font, you inevitably notice, that ecofont is considerably thicker. Also the default 10pt size, which is set up in LaTeX is considerably bigger (this is a subjective notice). Now I set the ecofont to 8pt in the example. At this size, the letters seem to be the same size az the standats LaTeX font (though the cms still seems a little more thin at some placeses). Furthermore, you have the pixel thin sans sherif fonts (fonts without a practical thickness), but these may be bigger to achieve the same redibility.
Conclusion
You can use ecofont in LaTeX, and it’s quite easy, once you have the necessary files generated. To determine the objective truth, wheather it’s worth it to use ecofont, the letter surface should be calculated, but this is beyond my interest in the matter.
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