"Toner/Ink Saver" implementation?

[gary carroll]

I can't seem to detect any change in text documents sent to a PostScript 
printer using the brightness=200. Does setting "brightness" lighter 
affect text as well as graphics? Would it work when printed to a PCL 
printer (where presumably the text is ripped to bitmap)?
What I would like to do is compress the range of grays so that maximum 
black is some value less than fully saturated and play with the value to 
get optimum readability vs. tone savings, with the documents consisting 
largely of text.

One possiblity is to develop alternate fonts and do substitutions is GS, 
but if there is a neat way to do this with a setting (or by RIPing to 
tif then printing that) I'd rather do it that way.


Michael Sweet wrote:
> gary carroll wrote:
> 
>> It would seem that using CUPs and / or Ghostscript it would be pretty 
>> straightforward to do a “toner / ink saver” type of printing to 
>> printers that do not incorporate this feature in their firmware. 
>> Basically, rip each page at less than 100% saturation.
>> I don’t want to re-invent the wheel… however, it is not clear to me 
>> how to do this simply. Is there some parameter that I am missing?
> 
> 
> Err, make that:
> 
>     lp -o brightness=200 filename
>