08
Aug
Edit Text to Save Paper
My colleague Andrew (in a non-profit I’m a part of) had a major document to distribute that was just over five pages in length.
Andrew modified a couple of margins and edited some non-essential words out of the text which shortened the document to 4 pages.
He thus printed it on 2 sheets of paper, front and back. (update 8.7.07) His simple editing saved 450 sheets of paper.
The cynics might dismiss this as a one-time $3 savings (+ ink). But it’s much more than that. It’s the perspective and habit that develops of always doing better today than yesterday. That is a world-beating attitude!
August 6th, 2007 at 5:37 pmThere’s also software you can get to automatically reformat printed web page articles. I hate it when something I print to take on the plane prints that extra page with just the copyright notice.
I save those “wasted” pages and print on the backside for a later document.
August 6th, 2007 at 9:54 pmI always print documents for personal use (e.g. web pages I want to read later on the train) double sided and two pages per side. Many printers these days have this functionality and it saves a lot of paper on long documents (200 page document down to 50 pages). Additionally it tends to be quicker than printing out full size and single sided (the extra time taken to construct the ‘page’ is offset by the time savced feeding less paper) and makes very large documents easier to handle (200 pages is a sizeable block of paper, 50 is much easier to handle).
One downside is that the print can be quite small but it’s quite easy to find credit card sized magnifiers (using a Fresnel lens) that deal with that and fit easily in a pocket or wallet.
Another fairly easy step to take is to only print the pages you need. Not so easy with webpages where you can’t see the page breaks but for word processor documents it’s not difficult. Even just leaving off the boiler plate and change control, that all corporate documents seem to have these days, and the index and glossary can cut a sizable chank from the page count.
Stephen
August 7th, 2007 at 4:19 amYou can also reformat Excel spreadsheets to optimize printing - In “page setup” you can set a percent reduction for printing. In “print preview” if you click “margins” you can just drag column width lines until everything fits. In “format-cells”, click the alignment tab, and you can wrap text.
August 7th, 2007 at 8:34 amDigital Offset Printing: The Answer To Expensive Offset Printing…
Have you ever wondered why the cover of your favorite magazine looks so good? It’s because of offset printing. Offset printing creates prints that are vibrant and crisp. However, offset printing is an expensive printing service since it requires compl…
February 5th, 2008 at 10:37 amOne of the teams I work with tracked the life cycle of a piece of paper in their government agency. It really is more than just the cost of the piece. There is the additional cost of handling, assembling, reading, filing, sorting, archiving, offsite storage, archiving….etc……
May 22nd, 2008 at 6:47 am