A 14-year-old pointed out that the United States government could save $400 million on ink through a font change.
According to Survir Mirchandani, a middle school student from Pittsburgh, the government should consider using Garmond for printing to bring about a 30 percent reduction in federal costs. That would amount to $136 million a year and another $234 million if the state governments followed suit, NY Daily News reported.
"Ink is two times more expensive than French perfume by volume," Mirchandani said, according to CNN.
The idea came to Survir when he began to think of ways to cut down ink usage at his school, which was giving too many hand-outs.
He collected random samples of teachers' hand-outs to figure out how often the most commonly used characters e, t, a, o and r were used.
"He charted how often each character was used in four different typefaces: Garamond, Times New Roman, Century Gothic and Comic Sans. Then he measured how much ink was used for each letter, using a commercial tool called APFill Ink Coverage Software," according to CNN.
After enlarging and printing the characters on paper, he made cut-outs of the characters on cardstock paper for weighing.
"From this analysis, Suvir figured out that by using Garamond with its thinner strokes, his school district could reduce its ink consumption by 24%, and in turn save as much as $21,000 annually," CNN reported.
His findings were submitted in a paper to the Journal of Emerging Investigators.
"We were so impressed. We really could see the real-word application in Suvir's paper," said Dr Sarah fankhauser the founder of the journal, Forbes reported. The journal encouraged Survir to scale up his efforts to determine what the government save in its annual printing expenditure of $1.8 billion.
The experiment repeated on five sample pages from Government Printing Office website, showed potential savings of $ 400 million.
