Spurred on by a teacher, Mirchandani submitted his research to the Journal of Emerging Investigators, which publishes the work of high school and middle-school students, CNN reported.
The journal’s editors encouraged Suvir to see if the font switch would result in similar savings for the U.S. government, which according to the Office of Management and Budget has an estimated $1.8 billion printing budget for 2014.
“We were so impressed,” Dr. Sarah Fankhauser, the journal’s founder, told Forbes. “We really could see the real-word application in Suvir’s paper.”
Suvir tested his font theory with five documents from the Government Printing Office (GPO) and concluded that switching the government documents’ fonts from Times New Roman and Century Gothic (used on all government documents) exclusively to the more space-efficient Garamond would greatly cut costs in ink expenditure for both state and federal governments. The font point size remained the same in the study. He predicts the federal government would save roughly $136 million a year, and state agencies could collectively save up to $234 million annually.
There was alsoa local student who discovered middle school was the beginning of copious paper handouts.
He suggested all mailers and handouts be printed on both sides of the page, instead of wasting the back of the paper.
Local schools are running with this idea.
We’ll see how much it saves one district.
The font change is a good idea, too.
More words per page and each letter uses less ink.
Saves both paper and ink = money.
Apple computers don’t have that font. Other ways to save ink:
(1) Use the smallest font that can be easily read.
(2) Set your printer for the ink saving mode, unless you need the quality. If you have pages with images on them that you want printed at high quality, choose the individual pages you want printed at which quality.
If you’ve seen, not necessarily read, a copy of the Federal Register, the font size is already quite small as it is. Switching to another font type, that would to be taken into account in terms of readability. Since it seems the Garamond font fills that bill, maintaining readability, asking government to switch fonts may be a tall order.
@David: #3
If you have ever seen a federal bill printed out, two things come into question:
(1) Why is every line double spaced? I can see a space between sections, but EVERY LINE is double spaced.
(2) Why is there such a wide border?
I don’t know if all bills in congress are written this way, but the ones I have seen have been. I have wondered how much extra paper is used to print the bills out, and did the company who sells the paper to the government, petition congress to print the bills out this way? How many extra millions are spent for paper not needed?
@Smorgasbord:
So Democrats can write in changes after it’s passed.
@Ditto: #5
The obamacare bill must have a lot of spaces between EVERY line.