Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

On the ink cartridge package details it often states, “based on 5% A4 coverage”.

Can you get the estimated coverage for a page?

IIRC, on a normal A4 page with an average amount of text with normal formatting and no graphics, 5% of the page gets covered with ink. Printing photos will require much more ink, of course. So, the number of pages that you can print with a cartridge depends on what's on the pages.

This site has some graphics and some information on that which may be helpful:
https://www.cartridgepeople.com/info/bl ... -explained

My own experience is that the 5% coverage figure is not relevant to my printing needs, where I am frequently printing duplex A4 sheets, making up 4 x A5s of book text. I expect only to get about 25% of the estimated cartridge life, be it toner or ink, so I always ensure that I have at least a full set of unused toners or cartridges on standby.

WhatHo wrote: ↑Sun May 24, 2026 3:50 pm Can you get the estimated coverage for a page?

If the question is
     For a given page in a document can Writer tell me how much of that page will be inked when printed?
then I believe the answer is
     OpenOffice Writer was not designed for that task and cannot provide the page's ink coverage percentage.

I will be surprised if you can find any topics on the forum which discuss this subject.

A Raster Graphics Editor might be able to determine the ink coverage. This is not the correct forum to discusss that software.

If this solved your problem please go to your first post use the Edit ✏️ button and add [Solved] to the start of the Subject field. Select the green checkmark icon at the same time.

A4 = 21.00cm x 29.70cm = 623.7cm2
5% = 100 / 20
Divide into 2 columns, and 10 rows gives:
10.5cm x 2.97cm = 31.185 cm2 <- this is 5% coverage
(check: 623.7 / 20 = 31.185)

Insert a table with 1 column and 1 row.
Make sure the table has zero boarders.
Set aligment to manual; width to 10.5 cm; background to black.
Set table row height to 2.97 cm

This produced a black rectangle measuring 395 x 111 pixels.
However the A4 page measured 794 x 1122 pixels; on this screen.
The rectangle multipled up is 790(4 short) x 1110(12 short)
A 5% box should measure 397 x 112(.2) pixels.
Since fractions of pixels are not possible, round this down.

Some renders use anti-aliasing; grey pixels to smooth the lines.
Take a grey scale raw image file format; 1 byte = 1 pixel.
There are 254 grey scales; plus FF for white and 00 for black.
White requires no ink, let this have a value of zero.
Increment by one through the grey scales, with black being 255
397 x 112(img) = 44,464 pixels x 255 = 11,338,320 5% black (20,247 short)
397 x 112.2(true) = 44,543.4 pixels x 255 = 11,358,567 5% black
794 x 1122 = 890,868 pixels x 255 = 227,171,340 100% black

Default style; Arial font; Size 12; three repeats of Lorem ipsum.
Regular typeface = count of 00 = 22,035 x 255 = 5,618,925 =~2.5% coverage.
Bold typeface = count of 00 = 132,309 x 255 = 33,738,795 =~15% coverage.
(there was no grey scales in this example; ClearType was switched off)

But you can see how this percentage could be calculated for text.

https://www.lexmark.com/common/images/i ... yields.pdf

You could take a screenshot or otherwise make an image of a page and count the white pixels using this page and subtract from the total size of the image:

https://townsean.github.io/canvas-pixel-color-counter/

But there are other factors such as draft printing would use less ink.

I ditched cartridges and got an ink tank printer - cheaper/no faff on with a syringe refilling the cartridges.

On a different setup, an A4 sheet was 1,125(pixel width) x 1,592(pixel height)
1,791,000 squared x 255 = 456,705,000 = 100% coverage.

Default Paragraph Style; Size 12; Three repeats of Lorem ipsum.
(font smoothing/grey scale was used here)
For two different fonts:

Arial = 18,241,326 = 4% coverage
Garamond = 12,806,857 = 2.8% coverage

Here you can see the Garamond font using less ink.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garamond# ... _ink_claim

What if you could see your ink saving right now, before you print.

WhatHo post_id=556348 wrote: What if you could see your ink saving right now, before you print.

Imho nothing would change:
- To save money on printing I avoid using cartridges and use a printer-refill with bottles.
- To save on the environment I avoid printing. That's also mentioned in your link about Garamond: The most saving you get by not printing.
- I think readability is the main concern
- Most companies have some kind of common look, including fonts and often don't like to change this. If they do the change it is often expensive and will not be covered by saving ink...

But: What would you change, if used colour would be shown in print-preview?

For LibreOffice you may try an request for enhancement. I'd guess it should be easy in print-preview, while a permanent recalculation during typing would be a waste of energy...