Last week Toshiba America Business Solutions announced a partnership with Adobe to launch Adobe LeanPrint, a desktop print optimization software that reduces paper and toner consumption by optimizing page layout. According to Toshiba, by using LeanPrint, organizations can achieve average savings of 40 percent when printing typical office documents.
Adobe LeanPrint technology reportedly changes the way individuals and businesses print documents. LeanPrint technology automatically tunes the formatting, colors and layout of a document before it is printed.
Adobe LeanPrint offers a set of plugins for Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Word, Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Reader, and Internet Explorer and Firefox Web browsers. The plugins are installed inside the applications, enabling an alternative print path using existing printing methods. For each supported document file format, LeanPrint has an ideal print output.
LeanPrint analyzes document structure to create a print-optimized layout and prints documents in two modes: Super Saver and Toner Saver. In Super Saver mode LeanPrint saves paper and toner while Toner Saver reduces ink and toner consumption. Users can also see real-time savings information via the LeanPrint status bar that tracks paper, toner and costs savings.
Using LeanPrint, documents are optimized for space and readability rather than reduced or placed in draft mode. Color charts and graphs are converted to black-and-white patterns to ensure readability. Additionally, text is laid out in newspaper-style columns to make better use of space and reduce page counts. Excel charts are reformatted to keep most graphs intact, and Web pages are printed without ink-intensive display ads.
This introduction illustrates Toshiba’s and Adobe’s commitment to the environment while providing Toshiba dealers with a key point of differentiation from their competitors. A press/analyst preview demonstrated the aforementioned capabilities of LeanPrint.
Bill Melo, vice president, marketing, services & solutions for Toshiba, first heard about LeanPrint a couple of years ago at an industry event where he met two individuals from Adobe who told them about the technology. A couple of months later he saw firsthand what it could do.
“In my 22 years in the industry there have been very few things that have gotten much of a rise out of me and this is perhaps the first time in memory I audibly said ‘Wow,’” recalls Melo.
Melo demonstrated four different applications of the product and each demo was impressive. It may sound like hype, but when Melo describes this as “a revolutionary type of product” with a “distinct and dramatic effect on the cost of print…,” you don’t doubt that after witnessing the demo.
Reducing paper and toner and ink costs is as green as it gets and dealers should be able to leverage this technology with their more environmentally conscious customers. Another plus is its ease of use.
“What makes this product so important and impactful is its unprecedented ease of use and ease of installation,” contends Melo. “It’s immediately intuitive to a user yet incredibly powerful.”
The question one might ask is why is Toshiba, a hardware company, embracing a product that helps people print less and print smarter?
“Many of our customers are looking to print less and have active projects internally to reduce the number of pages printed,” responds Melo. “The idea of printing less has been incorporated in our go-to-market strategy on print. When we tell people what our managed print program is about it’s all about divesting yourself of ownership of assets, paying only what you print, and printing less.”
LeanPrint is different from some of the existing features and third-party applications that Toshiba offers to help customers reduce output of unwanted print jobs and/or modify printing behavior.
“First of all it’s a plug in so it’s not a separate application that requires a deep learning curve or where adoption becomes an issue,” explains Melo. “It’s built into the main application you’re printing in.”
LeanPrint has two primary functions, one is print optimization. Here LeanPrint analyzes the content you’re about to output and determines whether there’s a more efficient way to lay out that output. As a result it consumes fewer pages yet still makes the document readable.
“In most cases more readable and more likely to be retained than the original format,” states Melo.
The demonstrations began with a 13-page Word document with dark fill, headers, and charts—pretty much a typical Word document. Clicking on the LeanPrint icon the program immediately takes that document and makes decisions as to how it will consume less paper and toner. When all was said and done, the 13-page document was reduced to a 4-page document with toner savings of 64 percent.
Users have the option to make adjustments to the document before printing, going for a darker level of print, for example, while still using 50 percent less toner because of the way LeanPrint compresses and lays out the document. Or the user can switch from three columns to two, use large print sizes, which changes the layout, in this case resulting in 5 pages of output instead of 13, still a savings of 8 pages.
Toner Saver mode doesn’t affect the layout of the document, it only reduces the use of toner.
A dashboard identifies the choices LeanPrint and users can make on any given print job, noting what the actual savings are based on choices made by the system or the user. Plus every time a document is printed, the system records the individual user’s savings, identifying what they would have printed versus what they printed via LeanPrint. Those calculations are stored for the user in the “My Savings” tab. By clicking on that tab one can see the day to day, monthly, and yearly paper and toner savings as well as the combined costs. For example, if a user didn’t have LeanPrint they would have printed 500+ pages in one day, but by using LeanPrint they can see that they only printed 205 pages.
The Excel demo was equally impressive as LeanPrint looks for the content on the page and optimizes the layout, which can be tricky with your average Excel spreadsheet. With a single click of a button, Melo went from six pages to two with all charts logically aligned.
“This saves a lot of time and frustration in getting everything lined up,” he says.
What LeanPrint can do in Adobe Acrobat was also fascinating. Melo explains that Acrobat poses a challenge because the user has to deconstruct images and reconstruct them. He began with a 44-page document with background, charts, Webflow diagram, etc. then selected the portions of the document that were more important to keep intact than others. By the end of the demo, a 44-page document was compressed to 16 pages. LeanPrint was even able to calculate what was in the document and decided what portions could not be logically reduced.
The final demo focused on printing Web pages from Internet Explorer.
“Browsers pose some interesting challenges because they defy the normal page layout paradigm,” states Melo. “Excel, PDF, and Word documents have a concept of an 8 ½ x 11 page. The Web knows nothing about page construction.
What Melo was looking to print would have ended up as 23 pages of output that as anyone who has ever printed Web pages can attest to, wouldn’t always be lined up neatly.
With LeanPrint the application senses the Web page is comprised of multiple discrete parts, different types of articles, and knows the user may not be interested in every article. This requires the user to go through each page and find which ones he’s interested in keeping and which he’s not. By reviewing and removing all the extraneous data Melo was able to save 10 pages worth of output and 78 percent of toner. LeanPrint also allows him to make choices as to whether or not to print the pictures on those Web pages. In this demo he saved 90 percent of toner and reduced the output to 5 pages from 23.
The neat thing about the LeanPrint demo in Explorer was that you can select an article on the Web, remove pictures and ads, and print it out minus all the superfluous stuff.
“It’s very simple, intuitive, and quick,” concludes Melo.
Altogether the four jobs Melo would have created in the demo would have printed on 70 pages. With LeanPrint that number was reduced to 23 for a savings of 67 percent while toner savings ranged from 60-84 percent on each job.
This is one of those cases where if you didn’t see it you might not have believed it. And to quote Lou Costello from Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein, “I saw what I saw when I saw it.”
Toshiba is Adobe’s first partner to go to market with LeanPrint and a key collaborator in its development. Starting March 5, a free 30-day trial version of LeanPrint is available for download at http://business.toshiba.com. LeanPrint is also available for purchase at $99 per PC user or through a subscription program at $36 per user per year and is available to Toshiba’s customers via its channel partners.
For more information about Adobe LeanPrint and to see a video on how it works, visit http://business.toshiba.com.
