Method and system for paper saving printer (16-Sep-2009)

Method and system for paper saving printer

Nowadays printers have become more and more common in offices, homes and are available

providing ease of access and ease of customization. This diffusion is

leading, though, to a great use and often waste of paper, because white new sheets are used even to print partial pages or small piece of data.

The best evidence of this problem can be found in particular when people have to print data for

personal use that don't require good-looking style or because they are going to cut specific

portion of the paper.

Even in such cases the user needs a brand new paper unless he pays attention inserting paper that match his specific need taking also care of printing area before performing the print command: the consequence is obviously either a wasting of paper or a user frustration trying to accommodate his needs and also saving papers.

The problem is also more relevant in an office where often employee print draft of data just for review them before official printing. The use of recycled paper is a factor that could help saving wood, but is not so widespread and doesn't prevent the waste of paper when printing small content on new sheets.

It is an object of current article to propose a method and a system for providing printers with a way to reuse paper partially written. The provided solution consists of a pluggable component for a printer that is able to realize the matching between the free areas of a paper with the area that is going to be printed.

The system will provide the user with an additional option that is 'paper saving' mode together with the traditional 'presentation mode' or 'draft' mode to save ink. When such mode is selected, the print system by default won't make use of new white sheets but will leverage already used

papers, let's say "recycled by user" paper.

When using such papers the printer will automatically choose the right sheet or sheets, optimize the free space within a single sheet or differentiate new printed content from previous ones. Of course the users will be notified about the capability to reuse sheets and if not an optional warning...