How to print for less: ink, paper and the settings that matter
By Nasir Uddin Shamim ยท Founder, PrintxPDF
Short answer: The four settings that matter most are duplex, greyscale, draft quality and pages per sheet. Applied together they typically cut the cost of a document by 70 to 90 percent. Set them as your printer defaults rather than per job, and use print preview and page ranges to avoid printing pages nobody reads.
Printing is one of the few household and office costs where the price per unit is almost entirely under your control and almost nobody looks at it. The same document can cost eighteen cents or two dollars ninety depending on four settings, none of which are hidden and all of which your printer remembers once you set them. These guides cover the ink side, the paper side, and the habits that stop pages being printed at all.
Every guide in this topic
- How to save ink when printing, Cut ink and toner use by half: draft mode, true black-only greyscale, ink-efficient fonts, dropping images and backgrounds, and cartridge choices that pay.
- How to print double-sided, including without a duplex printer, Print on both sides with or without a duplex unit: long edge versus short edge, manual odd and even pages, and how to stop sheets printing upside down.
- How to fit more on a printed page without making it unreadable, Scale, margins, line spacing and pages per sheet compared, with a minimum readable size table so you know how far to push a document before it breaks.
- How to print less and waste less, Ten habits that cut printing waste: preview discipline, page ranges, a PDF-first workflow, recycled paper, cartridge recycling and the real cost per page.