Cutting Costs through ... Fonts??

Fascinating

A study in 2009 showed that switching to Century Gothic could save businesses as much as $80 per printer per year. The university predicts that this year it will reduce its $100,000 print-supplies bill by around 10% by making this simple change. ...

Ecofont, has found a way to make a font that is even thriftier: by punching holes in the letters. The firm did this by creating a new version of a popular font called Vera Sans which is shot through with tiny holes (see below). The firm says this can reduce the amount of ink or toner needed by 25%, with no effect on legibility....

Perhaps the most popular trick is to cover the tiny window in toner cartridges with a piece of tape, fooling the optical sensor into thinking that the cartridge is always full. This correspondent recently squeezed an additional two months of life from a supposedly empty toner cartridge before the first streaks appeared on printed pages....

There is also an increasingly popular top-down option, known in the trade as “managed print services” (MPS). This involves outsourcing the operation and management of office printers and copiers to an external supplier such as HP, Xerox or Ricoh. That supplier is paid a monthly fee, and then has an incentive to cut printing costs by exploiting economies of scale in procurement, replacing printers with more efficient models and so forth

I'm trying to remember the Rumpole story where he faced down the fellow who wanted to cut costs at the office and I'm drawing a blank. It comes to mind whenever I face one-ply toilet paper at Cornell.