
Teen to government: Change your typeface, save millions - matttah
http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/27/living/student-money-saving-typeface-garamond-schools/index.html?hpt=hp_bn11
======
6cxs2hd6
As I type this comment, most other comments are pointing out how a 6th grader
got this wrong, by failing to suggest the "correct" solution of abandoning
printing.

I don't... how do I put this nicely.

This is a kid. He is smart. He looked at the problem from a new angle. He came
up with a nice hack. Presumably we want more kids with more of a hacking
spirit.

I hope he doesn't read Hacker News.

~~~
zimpenfish
My main issue with him is that he didn't spend 5 minutes researching this on
the internet because it's come up many times previously and doesn't count as a
nice hack worthy of any praise. Sorry kiddo.

As an example, these links are all 2010 or earlier.

[http://www.cnet.com/uk/news/the-right-font-can-save-you-
mone...](http://www.cnet.com/uk/news/the-right-font-can-save-you-money/)
[http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1256396...](http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125639616)
[http://www.sitepoint.com/cut-costs-by-saving-ink-with-
ecofon...](http://www.sitepoint.com/cut-costs-by-saving-ink-with-ecofont/)

etc.etc.

~~~
jwr
This is why I think the Internet might actually be stifling innovation and
creativity.

I find that more and more often I think of something, then search on the
internet, and if I see that someone somewhere has done anything similar, I
abandon the project immediately. After all, it's been done, so what's the
point?

Net result if we push this to an extreme: instead of pursuing interesting
ideas people end up wasting time in useless discussions on Hacker News, thus
adding exactly zero value and failing to move humanity forward.

At a first approximation, _everything_ has been tried by someone. It is very,
very rare to have a truly groundbreaking idea. But that's not a problem!
Humanity advances mostly through incremental improvements, not just by giant
leaps.

So stop criticizing and start _doing_.

~~~
zimpenfish
The Internet is stifling innovation and creativity? Which Internet are you on?
Mine is -full- of innovation and creativity. There's too much, in fact, to
keep up with on a daily basis which is why I have to subscribe to aggregators
like Hacker News!

~~~
aryastark
yes, but some of us have higher standards of creativity than the 100th version
of 2048 or the front page of reddit.

~~~
saucetenuto
> the 100th version of 2048

Be fair: the internet also gave us the _first_ version.

------
300bps
_He 's right: Chanel No. 5 perfume costs $38 per ounce, while the equivalent
amount of Hewlett-Packard printer ink can cost up to $75._

Most offices that I've seen use laser printers. Toner isn't cheap but it's
cheaper by several orders of magnitude over the ink in an inkjet printer
they're using for the comparison here.

 _the GPO 's efforts to become more environmentally sustainable were focused
on shifting content to the Web._

This is the right answer. It's a permanent solution to a long-term problem.

 _Teen to government: Change your typeface, save millions_

What he's really saying is: "Spend millions changing your typeface, maybe save
millions." There are laws that dictate how forms and paper must appear.
Changing the font could have many unintended consequences that will need to be
studied and tested for, probably by high-priced consultants. And of course
you'll have to test if the new forms are as readable by low-vision citizens
and people with other disabilities.

But have to hand it to a 14 year old at least thinking about this stuff.

~~~
evanb
Also, 38*2 = 76 > 75\. So... he's wrong, as far as this particular comparison
goes. I know that's not the point---that the point is the order-of-magnitude
comparison. But _someone_ at CNN needs to be checking this kind of thing,
right?

~~~
saalweachter
You're thinking like a computer scientist, with infinite precision. "twice" is
only one significant figure; 38 * 2 = 80; round 75 to one significant figure
to compare, and you've got 80 = 80.

</bs>

------
zeidrich
The problem with this kind of initiative is that it uses humans difficulty
with recognizing the scale of large numbers.

We see a savings of $400 million and think "we should do this!" But it's a
drop in the bucket even if it were that much of a savings.

If each government employee needs to change their font, or needs to set it as
the default font, or needs technical support to configure the defaults in
their word processor. If IT needs to modify images to use this font as a
default. Just these actions are going to cost a significant portion of that
$400 million when you consider it across the millions of federal staff.

This also assumes things like the government is actually paying for ink or
toner in quantity, instead of, for instance, holding a contract with Xerox who
charges per impression rather than based on how much ink you use.

It also assumes that there is no difference in legibility between the fonts.
That people with vision impairments will not have difficulty with reading the
document.

An easy way to think about whether an initiative like this is reasonable is to
think about whether it makes a lot of sense for any individual to do. Do you
think you, individually, could realize any significant savings by changing
your fonts? If it only makes sense when millions of people do it at once, and
even then only when certain assumptions are met, and then only saves a few
dollars per person per year, then it actually is more likely to cost a lot
more in overhead to make sure it happens than it will ever save.

~~~
winslow
"But it's a drop in the bucket even if it were that much of a savings."

Yes, everything is a drop in the bucket when looking at the Federal bugdet and
the current debt of 17.5 trillion [1]. However, a 14 year old kid has a well
thought out and proven plan to save money. Where do you recommend we start?
The drops fill up the bucket faster than you think.

[1] - [http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/](http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/)

~~~
jberryman
Actually there's a small handful of things that are the drivers of the debt:
stupid tax cuts, stupid wars, issues with Medicare and a few other things; the
drops don't add up, they just distract

------
R_Edward
First, I like the kid's methodology. You can eyeball the various differences
between font X and font Y, and see that the same passage printed in one is
going to take more ink than the other, but how do you quantify the difference?
He came up with a clever hack to relate an easily measurable attribute to a
not-so-easily measured one.

Second, intentionally or otherwise, he managed to divorce the savings ratio
from the type of ink being used--whether you laser-print, inkjet-print, or
press-print your text on paper, you're going to use x% less ink or toner with
one font versus another.

However, the selection of a font should take things into consideration besides
the relative amount of ink needed to produce a body of text. Human and machine
readability should also be significant concerns. And I would like to point out
that a cost savings of $136 million represents less than two seconds worth of
spending at the US governments current spend rate of $3.5 trillion per year. I
don't know about anyone else, but I can't even imagine that level of spending!

~~~
magoghm
Isn't $3.5 trillion per year slightly less than $111K per second?

~~~
R_Edward
Aw, dangit! That right there is why I should always double-check my mental
math with a calculator.

I should have said 20.45 minutes, not 1.## seconds. Mea culpa. It's still not
a huge savings, comparatively.

~~~
tonyhb
Comparatively, bringing fiber to NYC won't be so expensive (considering the
results).

At this point, it's not about comparatively. Optimising $240m a year is _so_
fucking good when it's a short switch. Low hanging fruit.

How do you optimise your apps? "Oh, this 100ms optimisation that is a one-
pointer is comparatively not worth it, let's not do it"?

------
mxfh
While this is arguable clever, a similiar concept has been known for ages to
traditional printers.

There is a whole class of typefaces optimized for high speed, low cost/low
quality printing, which pre-compensates the letterform for expected ink
bleeding, so called _Ink Traps_ [1][2]. They are highly optimized for a
specific printing method, the font size and the paper-quality used, and don't
translate well to non-ink based printing.

The problem with current desktop publishing fonts is that they can't possibly
be optimized for every single use case on screen and for all of the myriad
types of printing so robustness while maintaining legibility is key.
Especially if the product is expected to be photocopied I would always go for
a reasonable bolder weight, uncondensed typeface rather than losing
information.

Also make sure the 8 is distinct enough from a 6 [3] (Times New Roman beats
Arial by lengths in this aspect)

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ink_trap](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ink_trap)

[2] [http://designmind.frogdesign.com/blog/calculated-errors-
the-...](http://designmind.frogdesign.com/blog/calculated-errors-the-ink-
trap.html)

[3] [http://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-
workcentres_...](http://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-
workcentres_are_switching_written_numbers_when_scanning)

------
al2o3cr
I don't wanna be the asshole here, but something tells me the GPO is not
paying HP prices for "ink" \- they're almost certainly using toner-based
systems that vastly reduce the incremental cost per page. According to the
LoC, a single day's Congressional Record averages 272 pages, so printing 2500
of them A DAY is 500,000 pages. At that point, you'd be worrying about how
many inkjet _printers_ you were throwing away every day...

~~~
nardi
According to the article, they spend over $400 million a year _on ink_. It
doesn't matter whether that's inkjet, or laser, or what. If they use 25% less
of it, they'll save 25%.

------
johngalt
IT perspective:

Interesting and subtle change. However it will likely be net negative. Most
high volume copiers/printers are laser and/or covered by a cost per copy
maintenance agreement. Meaning that most organizations pay the same price for
a page regardless of how much toner is used on that page.

Contrast this with the cost of enforcing a single font family across millions
of systems and documents. There are a large number of unseen costs here.
Imagine 10 years from now some vendor responding to an RFP for healthcare.gov
v2.0. The government insisting that the source code be converted to garamond
for the weekly status reports. The HN posts that day will be about how
ridiculous of a requirement this is.

~~~
wffurr
I was just thinking that there was no analysis of the cost to roll out
Garamond to all the machines and software in the federal government – I
imagine it would be quite expensive.

------
happywolf
I would say a 14-year-old could achieve this is pretty impressive. While we
give credit to his creativity and relative scientific investigation of this
matter, things shouldn't be stretched too far as to recommend everybody to
adopt this font everywhere. In this case, this seems the case. A printed
document is meant to be read, and it is unclear if using the said font will
have any impact on readability, and other usability issues.

Think about it: for the sake of optimizing ink use, the trivial solution is 1)
Use the smallest font sizes possible 2) Use the 'thinnest' font that arguably
uses the least ink. However optimizing a single varible in this way is clearly
not desirable, because it defeats the goal of printing documents. A document
is meant for someone to read, no? :)

------
Ellipsis753
Personally I prefer the original font. The thicker letters would likely
photocopy better too.

I use a Brother printer that cost me £40 2-4 years ago. I can buy 20
cartridges from Amazon that work perfectly for just £12.90 with shipping on
Amazon Prime. That's 65p each. A single original Brother cartridge can easily
cost £16.44 from Amazon or £7.62 each when bought in a pack of 4 (I think the
largest quantity they sell together). So these copy cartridges are over 10x
cheaper.

I've used them ever since I got this printer with no ill effects. The printer
still makes create printouts and prints photos great too. I've heard that
perhaps they break your printer faster than original cartridges but if this is
true when I'm happy to just spend the extra £40 ever few years to just buy a
new printer. I'll still have saved far more than that on ink alone (I print
quite a lot).

If anything perhaps this is the solution to cheaper printing instead?

Also, random note. Once I went a Korean friends house and they had a normal
inkjet printer with 4 gallons of ink in large pots of top of it. These had
small tubes feeding down into the cartridges. They never had to replace the
cartridges and they would _never_ run out of ink. Apparently this is quite
common in Korea although I've never seen it before or since myself in the UK.
From googling it was something like this:
[http://www.amazon.co.uk/PrinterKnow%C2%AE-Compatible-
Continu...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/PrinterKnow%C2%AE-Compatible-Continuous-
Expression-18/dp/B00E20X2M2/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1396019217&sr=8-6&keywords=Continuous+ink+system)
Although they had much larger ink containers. It seems it's called a
"continuous ink system".

It's pretty cool to look into anyway, even if you don't do a huge amount of
printing.

~~~
userbinator
Yes, CIS is quite popular in Asia where inkjets aren't as prone to nozzle
clogging but toner-based printers suffer from the more humid climate.

Buying generic ink in bulk quantities is also much cheaper than individual
cartridges (you can buy a whole LITRE of ink for the price of an original
cartridge for some printers), and you can even dilute it a significant amount
if you don't mind slightly reduced saturation - I've run 10:1 black dilution
in my CIS and the output looks only _very_ slightly greyish.

Some printers have EEPROMs on the cartridges to deter refilling/CIS systems
but the Chinese have produced "modchips", self-resetting cartridges, etc. to
get around this; some can even reflash the firmware, presumably with one that
has all the checks patched out.

------
lnanek2
Yeah, but Garamond is tougher to read, and ink prices are artificial anyway.
If less money is made on ink then printers will become more expensive again -
or more likely the price will just be raised more since it doesn't have much
relation to the cost anyway. Printer makers actually put chips in their ink
cartridges to prevent refills and cost effective generics after all. It is
more of a DRM thing.

~~~
Noxchi
Why doesn't someone make an open source printer?

------
ZeroGravitas
How about: "Prevent predatory and abusive pricing shenanigans by large
corporations and instead create some workable semblance of a free market, save
millions for yourself, save many further millions for your employers/voters,
and have the warm glow of doing your alloted job to some minimum standard".

~~~
ElDiablo666
Corporate pricing shenanigans and barriers to market performance are some of
the least important factors in what costs money and ails society. How much
freer of a market do you want? Anyone who claims that barriers to market
freedom are important are either confused or dangerously deluded. Real liberty
is abolishing corporations altogether because trying to fight corruption
within capitalism is pointless. It's time to end problems at their source, not
exacerbate them.

------
huhtenberg
Same idea, widely ridiculed - [http://www.ecofont.com](http://www.ecofont.com)

~~~
72deluxe
I visited the site and still have absolutely no clue what it does or what they
offer. I know I can buy a Home Pack but I don't actually know what it does.
Apparently, it can save me money somehow but I am still none the wiser.

It does show plants growing from piles of coins. Is it a fertiliser?

~~~
jccalhoun
from the product info l ink at the top of the page: "Ecofont software saves
ink and toner by leaving small holes in the letters."
[http://www.ecofont.com/en/products/green/printing/packages.h...](http://www.ecofont.com/en/products/green/printing/packages.html)

------
zacinbusiness
The government isn't going to abandon printing entirely, ever. There are too
many people who need access to documents who don't have printers, too much
information that is too sensitive to email back and forth, and too many
government offices with small one-off forms that visitors need right away.
Besides, let's look at the cost of electricity, maintenance, insurance for
broken and stolen devices, upgrade costs, and how pissed people will be when X
system gets hacked and their info is stollen. I'm sorry, but paper is here to
stay for a very long time.

~~~
walshemj
and for some tasks having it printed works better

------
mxfh
The US Government could probably save substantially more by not printing
blacked out pages like this for public hearings:
[http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lnbfetnw5V1qbqm2bo1_r1_250...](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lnbfetnw5V1qbqm2bo1_r1_250.gif)

900 pages of this at 5:10 in this 2011 Daily Show clip.
[http://thedailyshow.cc.com/videos/1mdpat/the-fast-and-the-
fu...](http://thedailyshow.cc.com/videos/1mdpat/the-fast-and-the-furious---
mexico-grift)

------
scrabble
Is the school using ink, or toner? Toner is significantly cheaper, and there
are still savings by switching fonts.

~~~
ams6110
My kids school sends home a ridiculous amount of paper. Here's a way to save a
ton more money: stop. It's 2014, we don't need paper to send information home
in most cases. Email or put it on a website.

~~~
aestra
Stupid idea. This works for _YOU_ but not other parents.

My _husband_ is still living in the stoneage and doesn't use email. He
actually has an email address, but doesn't check it, ever, not once in the
last several years. He doesn't even know what's in his inbox. He pays his
bills over the phone. My mother also doesn't use email, she never even got an
email address until 2 years ago, and never uses it. She still pays all her
bills with a paper check and snailmail. A growing number of children are being
raised by their grandparents[1][2], thus an older generation.

Some people don't have internet access, nor do they even care to have internet
access.

How should one know that the website is updated? Email? Well, you aren't going
to get everyone to read their email. Text message? Many people don't have
cellphones (especially old people), and if they did, I know several people who
don't have a texting plan, so they'd be paying extra for those messages. Some
people don't have cell service at home. My mother still can't figure out how
to text, or if she's got a message. I know it seems simple, but she just
doesn't get it. Phone calls? Well now you got a big infrastructure to build,
test, and maintain for automatic phonecall system.

"Johnny has been doing inappropriate things in class" is somewhat sensitive
information. If you want to put it on the web, you're going to have to create
logins, passwords, make sure that it is up to security standards, and deal
with parents who can't reset their password.

When I was going to primary school (over a decade ago!) the "IT facilities"
were beyond outdated, poorly maintained, and just not up to par in any
respect. We were still using floppy disks, which were an old technology even
then. Are we going to update every school with the latest equipment? At
taxpayers cost. Train the staff and teachers to use a new system? Maintain the
infrastructure?

Not everyone lives their life online. Get out of your own worldview for a
second.

Paper is easy, simple, and solves problems. If it isn't broken why fix it?

[1] [http://www.prb.org/Publications/Articles/2012/US-children-
gr...](http://www.prb.org/Publications/Articles/2012/US-children-
grandparents.aspx)

[2] In an interesting twist, not that it has ever come up, but my mother once
said she would love to raise her grandchildren. She gave her reasons as she is
now older, thus much wiser. She has way way more money now then my siblings
and I ever had growing up, so money issues wouldn't be a problem like it was
when we were growing up. She is now retired, so she would have all the time
needed.

~~~
dsr_
Actually, my wife fixed it for our kids' school.

She runs the mailing lists on a volunteer basis. Each classroom has a list.
Each class list is subscribed to the grade list. Each grade list is subscribed
to the all-school list. If this went across the whole district, the school
lists would be subscribed to the district list.

All lists are moderated; they're used only for announcements.

Each year, the first flyer to come home is the "how to subscribe for your
kids" sheet. The benefits are clear: less paper, faster delivery, no depending
on the kids to pull it out of their backpacks to show you. The lunch menu goes
out as a PDF. The PTO announces events that way.

Setting it up in the first place takes a couple hours and the cooperation of
the school secretary; getting the school IT involved turned out to be a big
lose. At the beginning of each year, there's an hour or two of reconfiguration
-- new teachers, retiring teachers, that sort of thing.

If you don't sign up for it, you get paper. More than 80% of parents sign up.

Are you thinking, sure, you live in a fancy school system? No. More than half
the kids who go to the elementary school qualify for free lunches. 78% of the
US has internet access at home. Parents of school-age children
disproportionately have cellphones and are willing to take email.

And no, you don't put "Johnny has been inappropriate in class" on mailing
lists.

~~~
amirmc
What you've said may _reduce_ paper but will not _get rid of it_.

From your figures, 20% of parents do not sign up and 22% of the US does not
have internet at home. These are non-trivial numbers. Also, your wife runs the
lists on a _volunteer_ basis so the cost of her time is not accounted for.
It's great that there's a system working for you but that doesn't mean it
would work elsewhere.

Sometimes I _want_ important messages to come via paper. I get through so many
emails a day that one from school might easily get lost in a busy day whereas
a letter would always stand out.

------
semi_colon
His best bet for making wide scale change is to have Microsoft change the
default font on Microsoft Word. Probably the most cost-efficient change.

------
yitchelle
This reminds of the dot matrix printer days, remember those? My 24 pin dot
matrix printer had several print modes and one of them uses a 7x4 matrix to
form a letter and less force for pushing the pins onto the ribbon.

I never really made any measurements, but I remember its documentation
mentioned a savings of up to 40% of ink. The normal mode of the printer is NLQ
[1], so it would be quite big when compare to NLQ.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot_matrix_printing#NLQ](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot_matrix_printing#NLQ)

~~~
Theodores
I was there, then. I remember the eco modes, however I think there was a speed
benefit too so 'NLQ' really was just for posh letters to people, code
printouts were in eco mode just because of the time required to print at NLQ.

I also remember the paper with tractor wheels and the possibilities for
wasting paper. To print one page tended to need three sheets as the print head
was some inches below the tractor wheels. To print that one page would require
a form feed to get to the start of a page, another to get to the end of the
printed page and a third form feed to make sure some paper was in the rollers.
Brilliant printers though, I would prefer one for occasional printing rather
than a dried out inkjet.

~~~
yitchelle
I also remember a hack to spray WD40 into the ribbon to stretch the ink a
little further.

------
billynomates1
I thought this was going to be about font licensing. Would the government save
any money by using open fonts?

------
xbryanx
Previously considered by the University of Wisconsin Green Bay:
[http://nowiknow.com/an-inkling-for-ink/](http://nowiknow.com/an-inkling-for-
ink/)

------
chrismcb
While it may look better on paper, in the sample in article I'd much rather be
reading a form printed with Times New Roman than Garamond. Seems a bit easier
to read

~~~
hajile
Moving to a sans-serif font that's a little thicker could probably solve both
problems at the same time.

------
3rd3
Sounds like a good idea! While we're on it we could also focus on modernizing
the overall bureaucracy by moving most services online.

Edit: Removed "Instead of", clarity

~~~
hrjet
I accidentally upvoted you. I agree with the overall sentiment except
s/Instead of/As well as/

~~~
3rd3
Instead of paying people for typesetting new forms and letters you could
instead pay people to typeset these in a digital format. Of course it would be
smart to use less ink in case someone wants to print these. That's what I
meant.

------
bluedino
Think of all the time that would be spent in meetings, all the time it would
take to re-configure documents and processes to use the new fonts, then all
the little stuff down the road like some OCR system doesn't pick the new font
up, handling complaints from people that the new font is too hard to see...

Not to say it's not a good idea, there's just potentially a lot of side
effects.

~~~
TophWells
I think $100M per year makes up for those side effects.

There will always be people whose workflows are interrupted by a new change,
and legacy systems that don't like it for their own reasons. There are already
systems in place to handle their complaints, because this is an expected part
of any change in a large organisation, and is barely worth mentioning.

~~~
johnward
"I think $100M per year makes up for those side effects."

You underestimate how much money governments can spend on meetings :)

------
drakaal
There are legal requirements to publish many things as Paper, so the Fed will
be in the business of printing for a long time.

I think for this solution to work they should actually consider even more
extreme type faces, font sizes, and shades of gray. How are we to know that
just making the letters "weight" lower wouldn't have the same effect? Clearly
we should commission a team of 12 experts to study which fonts cost the most
to print, their legibility by a group of 100 Americans who represent the
diverse age and backgrounds of American Citizens, and how fast they can read
them, factoring their average wage to also value the man power cost of the new
fonts.

To this end I'm submitting to my senator a proposal that outlines a $1 billion
earmark for research in to the cost savings available through a mandate to use
an alternate, but yet undetermined font. Additionally to avoid copyright
issues on fonts, $4 billion will be set aside to find a team to create a new
public domain font that will be accessible to anyone.

In as soon as 5 years we should have a new font selected, and as early as 2030
all new documents will be printed in the new font. Lastly all existing public
works will be reprinted in the new font. We expect completion of this project
by 2050.

By 2050 the war with Russia, and China should be over, and the United States
of the Northern Hemisphere will be operating in only one language
Chinglussian. All documents will be printed in this.

Adding the additional characters that Chinglussian requires should only cost
another 8 Bitcoin. (the rate of inflation on BTC is expected to be practically
infinite as all the worlds wealth packs in to 40M coins). We have already
reserved those 8 Bitcoins, so as long as they aren't lent to another group in
the next 35 years the proposed budget will account for that.

------
pkill17
If only more of us thought in the same "minimal change, maximal effect"
paradigm as this teen. Good work! Keep hacking!

------
dkrich
Kudos on thinking outside the box.

My $0.02 on why this wouldn't fly- he's examining the problem from a bird's
eye view, ie, the entire government expenditure.

Documents, however, are printed by teams, usually small one's for whom even a
30% ink savings wouldn't make a dent compared to the money they spend
elsewhere. Thus no motivation for each team, and thus no major movement to
change behavior. If the teams are anything like ones that I've been a part of,
a lead will look at a document printed in Garamond, proclaim he doesn't like
it/can't read it, and ask for it to be reprinted in readable format.

------
admstockdale
I shared this with my students. We're learning about typefaces and graphic
design right now. Some of these comments picking about a 6th grader are
pitiful. We want to encourage these ways of thinking -- not nitpick

~~~
illuminate
I do not want to encourage shallow, not-thought-through ideas so we can fluff
the ego of children. The problem is not that we're encouraging kids, the
problem is that duller adults prefer simple ideas to working ones.

~~~
admstockdale
This was actually a well thought out idea. He took the time and tried to do
some research and analysis. While some of his conclusions were off, this is a
great way to learn and think. But publicly humiliating him (which I think is
the result of the media response), we're telling kids that if you make an
attempt, you're going to be ridiculed. I don't know if you've ever been in a
classroom, but one of the biggest problems is that kids feel like they can't
fail because they'll be labeled as an idiot. Calling the ideas of a 14 year
old trying to solve a problem "shallow" is pretty sad. I understand why kids
don't want to tackle topics in mathematics and computer science with attitudes
like this.

------
cabalamat
Would it even save the govermnent much money? Sure, if I print in a thinner
font on my laser printer, the ink will last longer. But if I'm printing
thousands of the same document, the print company will charge me exactly the
same price regardless of what font I use, of whether I use big blocks of
colour, or any other consideration of how much ink I use.

I suspect that when printing at scale, the cost of ink varying by font matters
little or nothing. It's certainly less important than other considerations in
choosing a font: ease of reading, what tone it sets, etc.

------
colechristensen
Clever kid, but not a real solution to a real problem. Printers using ink cost
orders of magnitude more per page than printers using toner. Reworking all the
governments forms would cost billions.

~~~
aestra
I don't think we need to rework government forms. It could be used for new
forms, or when the form gets a revision.

------
rexreed
How could there possibly be "no" to this from the Fed. Govt? If you don't need
to print, then don't print. If you print, then print in a way that saves ink /
toner. Why not? How could the Federal Government possibly object? It's a "Yes
And" solution (to use Improv Comedy lingo). If you need to print, do it in a
way that saves money. There's no reason not to.

~~~
anigbrowl
The most obvious objection would be that Federal Government does not, in fact,
print everything in Times New Roman to begin with. I just reached into my
filing cabinet and grabbed some random documents from my 'Taxes' folder; turns
out the IRS communicates mostly in Helvetica or some similar Sans Serif font.

this whole story is based on the implicit assumption that nobody in the
government has ever thought about this issue before. As so often, that
assumption seems quite inaccurate.

------
johnvschmitt
Rather than attempt to get millions of people to manually change fonts, just
make "Skimpy Print" a layer that fits in between the print button & the
printer driver?

[http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Skimpy_20Print_20Default](http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Skimpy_20Print_20Default)

BTW: More ink is saved by image detection & changes than fonts. And, this is
all half-baked.

~~~
anigbrowl
We could call it 'draft mode'.

~~~
judk
200 comments and only one person has observed that this whole font silliness
is superseded by a print driver setting that has been standard for decades.

------
Ryel
There's always going to be a more efficient way, but when nobody else is doing
anything actionable, who cares?

Congrats to the kid, he got his 15 minutes of fame. I hope it will motivate
him to continue improving this world. The benefit for the rest of us is that
hopefully with all of this attention, someone more qualified will come along
and actually start some significant changes.

------
jmadsen
This was done by the UW-Green Bay years ago (among many, many others, I'm
sure) and was featured in Dan Lewis' "Now I Know" newsletter about a week ago.
( [http://nowiknow.com/](http://nowiknow.com/) )

Still a worthwhile thing to report, I guess, but somehow manages to still be
very "the media is clueless"

------
floatboth
Garamond also looks good. I hate Times New Roman.

------
collyw
Actually I think a better cancel options built into printers / printer drivers
would save far more. Loads of times that I have wanted to print one page, and
ended up with a whole multi-page document.

And is it really necessary these days that Acrobat comes up with a different
print dialog from Firefox, which is different from another one?

------
vvoyer
Ink prices are high for end consumers, I bet the US gov does not use an HP-xx
for printing but rather big systems where ink price is less than paper.

I have been visiting a newspaper printing factory and they said the ink price
was a LOT LOT cheapear than the paper which cost a lot to them.

Ink is expensive for end-user consumers, not for big printing systems.

------
palakchokshi
Instead of changing the font on screen for documents can Printers have a
setting that would allow all printing to happen in Garamond or one of the
cheaper to print fonts? That way you have best of both worlds. Your screen
fonts will be what you like while your printed font will be the cheaper one.

------
seventytwo
Man, I wish I would have had that kind of support and encouragement by my
school when I was 14. They were far more concerned with streamlining for the
state standardized testing. I maxed out their math assessment test and all I
got was a pat on the back... "Meh, fuck it", I learned...

------
neil1
That is the highest price for ink and not the price that government's or
companies who buy in bulk pay.

------
JensRantil
Why not just switch to this? [http://pro.sony.com/bbsc/ssr/show-
digitalpaper/resource.solu...](http://pro.sony.com/bbsc/ssr/show-
digitalpaper/resource.solutions.bbsccms-assets-show-digitalpaper-
digitalpaper.shtml)

------
macco
Look at relative numbers, not absolute. This saves next to nothing. Sorry.

------
Jugurtha
Just as an exercise, do Ctrl+F in your browser and count how many "but" there
are in this thread.

He's a good kid, but..

It's nice, but..

The "yes, but" men attack. The knack to find problems in each solution..

~~~
illuminate
It's an attempt at politeness, not a strategy in itself.

------
peter303
Similar hack in Craigslist and Google: changing to a black ground saves a few
watts per user per year. But this adds up to tons of C02 over all users.

~~~
atonse
That ended up being sort-of debunked.

LCDs use about the same amount of energy to display blacks as they do whites.

Although there are energy savings with CRTs and OLED (don't most android
phones use OLED? so that might be the new point of savings)

------
lyndonh
Candy crush saga run via Facebook seems to really hit the processor hard. It
seems to me that we could save half the artic if we could ban it.

------
gesman
When he'll be 18, he'll start seeing that it's easier to change the government
than convincing government to change anything.

------
yannk
Can we redo this study with Comic Sans MS?

------
faddotio
This 6th Grader Stood Up To Government To Tell Them Something... And I Think
The Results Were Amazing.

------
ozh
Or use [http://www.ecofont.com/](http://www.ecofont.com/)

~~~
colechristensen
This feels very much like greenwashing, selling you a product that makes you
feel like you're doing something positive for the environment which actually
has extraordinarily minimal impact. I'm sure there are a thousand things a
person could do to lessen their impact before toner usage becomes a priority.

I would be very irritated if anybody handed me something with compromised
readability (letters filled with holes) to save a fraction of a penny in
toner.

~~~
collyw
There is a word for it, "greenwashing".

I have noticed this numerous times, where something is sold as green, but at
the end of the day, it produces more consumption, not less. Biofuels are a
perfect example in my opinion, as they are just burning more crap and
polluting the air. Only if the fuels are grown on what was previously concrete
does the whole green argument about biofuels make any sense.

~~~
vacri
Eh? Your criticism makes no sense. Burning a fossil fuel means taking an
existing source of captured carbon and releasing it into the air. Using
biofuels means burning the fuel, releasing carbon into the air... then
recapturing the carbon in the next batch of fuel to be grown. Plants don't
just spring out of the ether - they're made of carbon, taken from the air.
It's a zero sum game, unlike fossil fuels. No concrete required.

~~~
collyw
So a tree is growing before biofuels were developed. Say biofuels did not get
developed, the tree is still there converting carbon dioxide to oxygen and
hydrogen. (Generally a positive thing for the environment).

Now someone develops biofuels. Convert the tree to biofuels, and burns them.
One less tree, more CO2 (generally a bad thing for the environment). Whats
difficult to understand about that?

Now if you plant another tree on what was a piece of concrete, and burn that,
THEN you have a zero sum game. I imagine most of the biofuels are being grown
on lands which previously had (non-biofuel) plants growing rather than on
concrete.

~~~
vacri
Stop being fixated on reclaiming concrete. If you clear a section of forest
for crops and burn the harvested wood, you have one carbon release. Now you
grow crops for biofuels, you capture some carbon back. Convert to fuel and
burn it, another carbon release. Grow crops again and you have sequestered the
carbon again. Overall, you get the net effect of one large carbon release.

But you can't do the same with fossil fuels - all fossil fuels are carbon
releases, and that carbon is never recaptured by the process. The 'green
argument' is that after setup, there is little in the way of new carbon being
introduced, which is very much not the case with fossil fuels.

Separating your recyclable garbage doesn't mean you don't still generate non-
recyclable garbage and throw that out, yet doing this has helped reduce strain
on landfills and has had a host of other benefits. From your argument here,
because we don't turn recyclables back into the original oil or wood they came
from, it's not worth doing.

~~~
collyw
Well fossil fuels were plants a while back.

I guess it is a balance between having the carbon in / on the ground, or in
the air in CO2 form. Encouraging people to burn biofuels will only put more of
it in the air, or is there some evidence of less fossil fuels being burnt
since biofuels were developed?

------
yincrash
two things:

1\. is garamond less legible after photocopying than tnr?

2\. why not choose a sans serif font. serifs are wasting ink.

~~~
hocuspocus
The body of most printed stuff is typeset in serif fonts because it improves
legibility. Even on my fairly low definition e-reader, reading a book in a
sans serif font feels weird. Moreover, the stroke width of sans serif fonts is
usually fairly unvarying, which seems to offset what you gain by ditching the
serifs: [http://www.matthewrobinson.co.uk/Measuring-
Type](http://www.matthewrobinson.co.uk/Measuring-Type)

------
northisup
Has the 6th grader ever make a photocopy in triplicate of Times New Roman vs
Garamond?

------
antidaily
Let's build a smarter planet.

------
pekk
This title is terrible, but it might be the content too. Local teen has one
weird trick! The big bad government hates him!

------
jokoon
honestly, millions are that much money for the federal budget...

------
mxfh
This topic just irks me, it's sounds clever at first, but anyone who has just
a little education in print publishing (anyone who knows what CMYK stands for)
should be aware that there are way better ways make an impact on the amount of
ink used (not to say, saving money).

\- If they would use something like InDesign they could print everything in
50% Black and could instantly save 50% no matter what.

\- Even worse is _Rich Black_ [1] printing which wastes 3 times the amount of
ink/toner namely CMY instead of K (black).

\- That the costs of getting something printed by an actual print service
company by printing press are surprisingly low given digital print ready
delivery and break even pretty fast, especially for colored prints, where the
quality is also vastly superior.

\- any school or organization of similar or bigger size should use
professional office grade black only laser printers for all default print
jobs, which should keep cost way below 5 cents/page. At all costs stay away
from consumer grade inkjet printers. And get only one! office grade Inkjet
printer with big and per color replaceable cartridges which pretty fast
compensates for it's initial cost and is also superior to color laser
printing.‡

Here is the actual study: [http://emerginginvestigators.org/wp-
content/uploads/2013/05/...](http://emerginginvestigators.org/wp-
content/uploads/2013/05/Mirchandani-2013.pdf)

This study completely omits to differentiate between text and graphic type
printing yet makes this quite thoughtful remark:

 _In addition, fonts may be chosen with a specific purpose in mind (e.g.
aesthetics), but posters and other graphical design in which font type could
have meaningful impact would usually be printed on a color printer. Color
toner ink costs for printing were not tested in this study. Another related
way of saving ink is the following: when an assignment is photocopied from a
book, a black border in the periphery is sometimes printed. This black border
gets copied, leading to a large wastage of ink. “Whiting out” the black
periphery would further reduce the ink usage in the school district. This
impact would be in addition to what was investigated in this study_

Let the kids have _Comic Sans_ if they want to, but let them know what it cost
what it needs to print their essays on inkjet printers on a rainbow colored
background. Normal text covers only between 2.8%[2] to 5% of a page. In other
ways a page with fully colored background can easily use more than 60 times
(100/5 * 3 Colors) the amount of ink than a simple text page.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_black](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_black)

[2] [http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr.-Grauert-
Brief](http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr.-Grauert-Brief) [German DIN Standard
Test Letter]

‡ [http://venturebeat.com/2014/03/24/hps-new-enterprise-ink-
bas...](http://venturebeat.com/2014/03/24/hps-new-enterprise-ink-based-
printers-can-operate-at-twice-the-speed-and-half-the-cost-of-laser-printers/)
(ballpark figure for original HP colored inks here is $100/100ml compared to
up to above $500/100ml for consumer grade ink portions)

------
olssy
400 million saved is 400 million removed from the economy, isn't it?

~~~
stefan_kendall3
Broken windows fallacy. I'll leave it to you to figure that out.

~~~
olssy
The broken window fallacy only works if the funds being spent can and will be
spent in a more productive way.

------
badman_ting
5-Year-Old to government: Your employees would be happier if you gave them
cookies

------
amykhar
Of course, the ink-sellers would just promptly raise their prices. But, it's
still a very creative way to approach the budget issue.

~~~
crusso
Is there a reason why you think that a typical price-demand curve wouldn't
apply to printer ink?

[http://www.bized.co.uk/learn/economics/markets/mechanism/int...](http://www.bized.co.uk/learn/economics/markets/mechanism/interactive/part1.htm)

~~~
jlarocco
Yes.

Ink and printers are complementary goods. A person can't buy whatever ink they
want, they need the ink that goes with their printer. At the same time, if ink
prices go up $5 per cartridge, few people will go out and buy an entirely new
printer.

~~~
crusso
Inelasticity of demand from complementary goods comes into play when the
complementary good is relatively very expensive or difficult to replace.

Consumer printers cost about the same as an ink cartridge or two. Consumers
aren't "stuck" paying for more expensive ink if manufacturers decide to start
screwing them on the price.

[edit: wanted to add this] Even with the ridiculously complementary goods of
automobiles and gasoline, more expensive gas shifts consumer demand away from
gas guzzlers.

~~~
johnward
This is why some people will actually buy a new printer when their ink runs
out.

~~~
djpowell
The cartridges in a new printer will typically be "starter cartridges" and
contain a fraction of the ink of a standard cartridge though.

~~~
johnward
This is true but I guess the people who do this either don't realize or still
think it's a better decision.

