I agree, on a global scale this could have real impact, especially if the headline grabbing aspect can encourage people to look at other ways to save ink and paper usage in general. I understand that there is a financial impact in laying out new forms, the future savings on ink costs could go towards a usability and accessibility audit and use the findings to inform the new layout designs :)
> there is a financial impact in laying out new forms
This is a huge cost. Consider the U.S. Army, one part of the much larger Department of Defense. The Army has literally thousands of pre-prepared forms [1] and manuals. It's likely that these forms get printed hundreds of thousands of times per day. You could indeed save a lot of ink by switching to Garamond but that means that each form needs to be re-done. Some are simple MS Word forms where it might be easy. Others are PDFs and most are XFL (awful Lotus Forms), all of which will take a major effort to convert. Multiply that time and effort across an entire government's worth of forms and the effort required is mind-boggling. It would take many years for this to pay off.
I use to work as a comsec custodian. It was my job to update or replace military publications with the newest version.
In the military/government, forms, publications, and manuals are regularly updated, distributed, and printed. Rolling out a new font on each update before distribution wouldn't be a huge task.
