Help / Printing
Printing with less ink
Ink is the expensive part of a home printer, and a sheet you print every week should use as little as the job allows. Three things decide how much goes on the page: the design, the settings, and how often the printer runs.
Start with the light-ink theme
Every template here has one. It sets the sheet on plain white, with the type and the rules in shades of gray and nothing in color. We added it for the sheets people print again and again, the weekly planner first, and then made it a rule for all thirty.
One thing to know. The free version of a template comes in a single theme, and it is not always the light one. The paid version has every theme.
Why a filled box costs more than a page of lines
Ink use comes down to how much of the page is covered. The page counts printed on a cartridge box are measured on pages that are about 5 percent covered, which is what a page of plain text looks like. A solid band across the top of a sheet can pass that on its own. A thin rule barely registers.
So a planner made of fine lines is cheap to print whatever its colors are. What costs is a tinted page. About one theme in four here colors the paper itself, a cream or a blush, and a colored page is ink from edge to edge however pale it looks. The light-ink theme leaves the paper white.
The settings that matter
Draft mode, which some printers call economy or toner save, puts down less ink everywhere. It is fine for a planner you will write all over. It is wrong for a certificate, where thin gray type looks like a mistake.
Grayscale is the bigger saving on an inkjet. Many inkjets mix their color inks to make gray, and some use color to deepen black, unless they are told not to. If nothing on the sheet needs to be in color, choose grayscale, and choose "black ink only" as well if your printer's dialog has it.
Check the paper type too. Left on a photo or glossy setting, the printer lays down far more ink than plain paper can hold, and the sheet comes out damp and wavy. For copier paper it should say "plain".
Print one before you print twenty
The most wasteful print job is the one you do twice. Print a single copy, look at it, and hold a ruler to it if size matters. Then run the rest. A wrong scale setting on twenty sheets throws away more ink than any theme will save you in a month.
A printer that sits still uses ink too
Inkjets clean their heads by pushing ink through them, and one that has not printed for weeks cleans hard when it wakes up. Printing a page every week or so keeps the nozzles clear for less ink than a deep clean takes.
If you print less often than that, a laser printer may suit you better, because toner is a dry powder and does not clog. If you print every week, an inkjet with refillable tanks is usually the cheapest per page. We cannot tell you which you have from here, but the rule holds either way: regular small jobs are kinder to an inkjet than rare big ones.