Reducing Ink and Saving Money When Printing

Per discussion on the LibreOffice Development list, some have been interested in reducing the amount of ink they use when printing documents for both economic and environmental reasons.

Possible methods of reducing ink include:

Font choice
Settings in LibreOffice (scaling ink color, outlining fonts)
Printer Settings

Font Choice

By careful font choice, one can reduce the amount of ink used for printing

The EcoFont company makes fonts that have been modified so that they have holes distributed throughout their strokes, just like holes drilled in airplane beams or like the holes in swiss cheese. Most of the fonts are available under a proprietary license; although one of the fonts is available for download, due to licensing problems this font is not FOSS.
Some font faces like Century Gothic use less link than some of the EcoFonts, although this font is a bit wide, and so will use more paper.

Settings in LibreOffice

As noted on the LibreOffice development list:

LibreOffice can save ink by tweaking the ways that the fonts are printed on the page:

Scalable ink saving (20-90%, or arbitrary values);
Extreme ink saving (>96%) with excellent readability

Compared to font choices (e.g. with the EcoFont), these settings provide:

Better layout on low resolution (<1200 dpi)
- Instead of ugly spotted letters it uses low level methods of printers to provide consistent typefaces;
It works with all fonts.

Usage:

For scalable ink savings, choose Grey 80%...Grey 10% colors for your text (you can add more colors to the palette
For extreme ink savings, set outlined character formatting (=~60% ink saving) and combine with Gray 90% text color.

Printer Settings

Nearly all printers offer a 'draft' or 'fast' mode in which they print using reduced amounts of ink.

This method can be very effective at reducing ink consumption.
Not only does this method work across all fonts, but it works with all documents that you print.
Consult your printer's manual for additional details.