Highlighter – Writer's Bloc Blog

April 21, 2015January 25, 2016

Appreciate Our Teachers!

Our school teachers face many challenges and work very hard to educate our young people, so they certainly deserve much appreciation and thanks. Why not show your appreciation with a gift of quality pens and paper? One of my elementary school teacher friends shared what her picks would be:

1) Highlighters. Highlighters are part of a teacher’s daily arsenal. The skinny ones with a fine tip on the other end are my friend’s favorite, such as Zebra Optex Highlighters or Tombow Twin Tip Highlighters.

2) Colorful Pens. Smooth writing colorful pens are good for grading papers. We like the STAEDTLER Triplus Roller pens – they have an ergonomic triangular barrel and the dry-safe feature enables these pens to be left uncapped for days at a time without drying up.

3) Pencil Pouch. A leather pen & pencil pouch is just what a teacher needs to corral a bunch of these colorful pens and highlighters. The Clairefontaine Basics Trapezoid Leather Pencil Case is just what your child’s geometry teacher needs, or the Aston Leather Pencil Pouch is another classy choice.

4) Fountain Pen. This old fashioned writing tool is making a comeback! It reduces writing fatigue because compared to a ballpoint pen less pressure is required when writing. This might just be the special gift that your teacher takes home to treasure for themselves! The Pilot Metropolitan Fountain Pen is a great deal for the price, or the LAMY Safari is noteworthy for its worldwide popularity. Remember to get some extra ink refills to go along with it!

Pilot Metropolitan Fountain Pen - Dots, Medium Nib — Pilot Metropolitan Fountain Pen – Dots, Medium Nib

5) Book Darts. Book Darts are metal line-markers that easily slip onto a page to mark important points so that you can find them later on. They can be reused over and over again in teacher books.

6) Organizing Notebook. A teacher needs a good notebook for taking notes during teacher training and meetings. We recommend the Clairefontaine Multiple Subject Notebook or the Rhodia Meeting Book with its Cornell note-taking page format.

Rhodia Classic Meeting Book - Large, Orange Cover — Rhodia Classic Meeting Book

7) Academic Planner. Help your teacher stay organized and on top of all of their meetings, activities and classroom events with a planner designed with teachers and students in mind. The Quo Vadis Minister Academic Weekly Planner provides your teacher with a detailed 8am to 9pm weekly schedule. The Minister and other academic planners are due to arrive in our shop towards the end of May or in June.

Quo Vadis Minister Planner - Black Soho Cover — Quo Vadis Minister Planner – Black Soho Cover

How do you like to show your appreciation for your favorite teacher?

July 15, 2014

5 Eco-Friendly Supplies for Back to School

1. Clairefontaine Notebooks

Clairefontaine has been making paper in France since 1858 and they are committed to controlling the environmental impact of their manufacturing process. They also happen to make notebooks in all sorts of formats that are great for school!

This paper is made from materials sourced from certified sustainable forests.
Clairefontaine recycles water, and when it leaves their paper mill this water is cleaner than when it arrived.
Their paper is chlorine-free.
Natural water-based vegetable oil pigment ink is used in printing.
Clairefontaine supplies 80% of their own energy needs.
They practice recycling and waste reduction.

2. Fountain Pen & Ink

Just how many disposable pens does one student use throughout their entire time spent in school? How about a multitude of students? It’s hard to even imagine the quantity of plastic pens tossed into the trash. Switch to a good fountain pen and you’ve got a pen that can last a lifetime! If you fill your fountain pen with bottled fountain pen ink, you’ll eliminate the need to throw away empty plastic ink cartridges refills. To use bottled ink you’ll want to be sure you have an ink converter or a piston-fill (or similar) fountain pen. Filling a fountain pen with bottled ink while you’re on the road or at school can be a little bit tricky, so I carry 2 fountain pens loaded with ink with me on those intense note-taking days.

3. Refillable Highlighters

Highlighters are another plastic writing tool that usually get tossed in the trash when they’re dried up. Take another step to help ease the strain on the environment by using refillable highlighters. There are many refillable highlighter options you’ve probably never thought of.

The ultimate long-lasting felt-tip highlighter is one that you can create yourself using Platinum Pens. Here are the instructions – Pen Mods: How to make a long-lasting refillable highlighter pen
You can use a fountain pen as a highlighter – there is no felt tip that wears out on a fountain pen! Read about my personal experience: Using Fountain Pens and Calligraphy Pens as Highlighters.
There are several choices of highlighters that are made to be refilled with either ink cartridges, eye dropper fill or via recharging stations. You’ll find the details in our Refillable Felt-Tip Highlighters blog post. These include the Staedtler Textsurfer Classic, Platinum Preppy Highlighters and Tombow Twin Highlighters.
You can also try out the D.I.Y. method of recharging highlighters.

Staedtler Textsurfer Classic Highlighter

4. Book Darts

Book Darts are paper-thin metal line-markers that slide onto the page of a book and are used as place-finders for facts, quotes, key points and passages that you want to refer to later. They do not stain or damage paper and eliminate the need to highlight, underline, bend page corners or use paper clips or sticky notes. These light-weight metal darts can be reused over and over again for a lifetime. You don’t have to know all the answers, just where to find them!

5. Quo Vadis Academic Planner

What makes Quo Vadis academic planners different than other academic planners? They are full of earth-friendly Clairefontaine paper and most of them have covers that can be refilled every year with a new calendar insert. In addition, your fountain pen will write amazingly well on super-smooth 90g Clairefontaine paper. Academic planners are the must have tool to juggle a busy class schedule.

What environmentally friendly back to school supplies would you like to recommend?

March 16, 2011January 22, 2014

Using J. Herbin Fountain Pen Ink as Highlighter Ink

Have you ever thought of using regular, non-fluorescent fountain pen ink as highlighter ink? More than once I’ve heard people wonder why ink companies bother creating fountain pen inks in light colors because when used for writing they can sometimes be hard to read. Besides being good for fans of bright colors, for artwork and for ink mixing, these colors are often valuable for use as highlighting inks!

I started out using J. Herbin Bouton d’Or regular yellow fountain pen ink for highlighters since it seemed the most obvious choice from my ink arsenal. I had such good results that I added Noodler’s Yellow to my calligraphy highlighter pens with similar good results. Recently I’ve been using J. Herbin’s Bleu Azur fountain pen ink in my Pelikan Script 2.0mm calligraphy pen and find that it’s the perfect shade of blue for highlighting.

We selected what we felt are the six lightest regular J. Herbin fountain pen ink colors and made some samples for you to take a look at. J. Herbin Bouton d’Or, Bleu Azur and Rose Tendresse are pretty typical “highlighter” colors (minus any fluorescence). Compared to your usual highlighter green, Vert Pré has more of a yellow tone to it and is a fresh, spring green. Diabolo Menthe is a pretty, light turquoise green that’s a fun alternative to regular highlighter blue. Bouquet d’Antan is to pink what denim blue is to blue, it’s kind of a faded, worn pink color that’s more subtle and easy on the eyes than blazingly fluorescent highlighter pinks. (We wish the combination of scanners and computer monitors would depict colors more accurately.)

These are our choices among J. Herbin’s wide variety of inks for use as highlighter colors. What do you think of these ink colors for highlighting? What are your favorite highlighting ink colors?

(This sample was made using a laser printer, cheap copier paper, a LAMY pen with a 1.9mm calligraphy nib, and a Pelikan Script with a 2.0mm nib. The ink descriptions come from the J. Herbin website. Sorry, I cannot seem to draw a straight line even if my life depended on it!)

February 23, 2011November 13, 2016

D.I.Y. Highlighter Recharging

Here’s a list of what you’ll need to recharge your dried-up highlighters:

One dried-up felt-tip highlighter with a felt ink reservoir (not the liquid ink tank kind)
One bottle of highlighter ink (such as Noodler’s or Pelikan M205)
One shot glass

Add a small amount of highlighter ink to the shot glass. Put the felt tip of the highlighter into the ink in the glass. Wait for at least an hour or more. If the ink in the glass runs dry, add more ink until the highlighter stops absorbing ink. Finished! A simple way to get more life out of your highlighters.

A few notes:

This method is not spill-proof like the Tombow Coat rechargers or Staedtler refill stations, so be careful! Make sure your cat does not tip the glass over.

Your highlighter will take on the characteristics of the new ink. This could be good or bad, depending on if you have any special highlighting needs such as quick drying, inkjet safe, non-bleed through, etc. There is a small chance of some kind of negative interaction between your highlighter and the new ink.

This method works great if the felt tip on your highlighter is still in good condition. After awhile the felt tip wears down and gets mushy and shapeless.

This method of refilling a highlighter works with highlighters that store ink in a cylindrical piece of absorbent material. It does not work with highlighters that have a liquid ink storage tank.

January 26, 2011February 21, 2017

Using Fountain Pens and Calligraphy Pens as Highlighters

The ultimate in environmentally friendly highlighting tools are fountain pens or calligraphy pens that can be used for years and years without ever wearing out. The felt tips on regular highlighters wear out quickly compared to a steel or gold fountain pen nib that can last a lifetime. I decided to give a few pens and inks a try to see what the experience was like and found that all of them were quite different.

First of all, I tried out the Pilot Parallel Pen with the 3.8mm nib and Noodler’s regular yellow ink. This nib was the widest nib that I tried and could produce a line that entirely covered words from top to bottom. The corners of the nib have defined 90 degree angles so my highlights had nice crisp edges. However, this feature plus the width of the nib slowed down my writing since the pen needs to be held properly in order to function well. The nib had a nice wet flow and words could be seen clearly through the Noodler’s yellow ink. This pen worked well as a highlighter, but I prefer a highlighter with a narrower tip.

Next I tried a couple of Pelikan Script calligraphy pens with 2.0mm nibs, Noodler’s Sunrise ink and Edelstein Mandarin ink. The nib on the Script pen had noticeably more flex to it than the other nibs I tried and I liked this feature, but one of the nibs also seemed to be a bit fussy because of the flex. The other nib was like butter. The corners of the nib are slightly less defined than the Pilot Parallel pen and produce a line with crisp edges. I really like the width of the 2.0mm nib for highlighting. The Sunrise ink worked well as highlighting ink, but depending on the paper the Mandarin ink was a bit dark for my taste.

Finally, I put a 1.9mm nib on my LAMY Safari and filled it with J. Herbin Bouton D’or. The corners of this nib are slightly more rounded than the corners of all the calligraphy nibs I used in this experiment, it was the most forgiving as to writing position and I could write the fastest with this nib. It also produced the narrowest line of all the nibs in this experiment. I felt that this line width could be used either for underlining or for highlighting if you don’t mind a thinner line. The Bouton D’or was probably my favorite of the inks discussed in this blog post.

Pelikan M205 Duo Highlighter Fountain Pen - Yellow — Pelikan M205 Duo Highlighter Fountain Pen – Yellow

The new Pelikan M205 Duo highlighter fountain pen takes another approach to highlighting and it is the topic of last week’s blog post. It has a BB nib, different than the other pens discussed here with calligraphy nibs. Pelikan has come out with a yellow highlighter ink to complement this pen. Update: Pelikan’s M205 Duo highlighter fountain pen is now also available in shiny green with green ink!

I found that the biggest drawback to using fountain pens as highlighters is that most of the time I am not highlighting on premium quality paper such as Clairefontaine DCP or Trophee paper. As a result, the ink used to highlight can sometimes bleed through the paper or feather. There are times when this isn’t much of an issue, but in other instances it was rather messy looking and annoying. At least the ink dried quickly on the cheap copier paper and other paper that I used.

Overall, I enjoyed using fountain pens and calligraphy pens as highlighters and will continue to do so. As far as what pen would be the very best for highlighting, I would say since everyone’s needs and preferences are so different to just experiment until you find something you like. Do you have any experience using fountain pens as highlighters? What works best for you?

The following test was done on cheap photocopier paper and the font size is an 11 point Calibri: