Teen to government: Change your typeface, save millions

As I type this comment, most other comments are pointing out how a 6th grader got this wrong, by failing to suggest the &quot;correct&quot; solution of abandoning printing.<p>I don&#x27;t... how do I put this nicely.<p>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.<p>I hope he doesn&#x27;t read Hacker News.

<i>He&#x27;s right: Chanel No. 5 perfume costs $38 per ounce, while the equivalent amount of Hewlett-Packard printer ink can cost up to $75.</i><p>Most offices that I&#x27;ve seen use laser printers. Toner isn&#x27;t cheap but it&#x27;s cheaper by several orders of magnitude over the ink in an inkjet printer they&#x27;re using for the comparison here.<p><i>the GPO&#x27;s efforts to become more environmentally sustainable were focused on shifting content to the Web.</i><p>This is the right answer. It&#x27;s a permanent solution to a long-term problem.<p><i>Teen to government: Change your typeface, save millions</i><p>What he&#x27;s really saying is: &quot;Spend millions changing your typeface, maybe save millions.&quot; 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&#x27;ll have to test if the new forms are as readable by low-vision citizens and people with other disabilities.<p>But have to hand it to a 14 year old at least thinking about this stuff.

The problem with this kind of initiative is that it uses humans difficulty with recognizing the scale of large numbers.<p>We see a savings of $400 million and think &quot;we should do this!&quot; But it&#x27;s a drop in the bucket even if it were that much of a savings.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.

First, I like the kid&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;re going to use x% less ink or toner with one font versus another.<p>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&#x27;t know about anyone else, but I can&#x27;t even imagine that level of spending!

While this is arguable clever, a similiar concept has been known for ages to traditional printers.<p>There is a whole class of typefaces optimized for high speed, low cost&#x2F;low quality printing, which pre-compensates the letterform for expected ink bleeding, so called <i>Ink Traps</i>[1][2]. They are highly optimized for a specific printing method, the font size and the paper-quality used, and don&#x27;t translate well to non-ink based printing.<p>The problem with current desktop publishing fonts is that they can&#x27;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.<p>Also make sure the 8 is distinct enough from a 6 [3] (Times New Roman beats Arial by lengths in this aspect)<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ink_trap" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ink_trap</a><p>[2] <a href="http://designmind.frogdesign.com/blog/calculated-errors-the-ink-trap.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;designmind.frogdesign.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;calculated-errors-the-...</a><p>[3] <a href="http://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres_are_switching_written_numbers_when_scanning" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dkriesel.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2013&#x2F;0802_xerox-workcentres_...</a>

I don&#x27;t wanna be the asshole here, but something tells me the GPO is not paying HP prices for &quot;ink&quot; - they&#x27;re almost certainly using toner-based systems that vastly reduce the incremental cost per page. According to the LoC, a single day&#x27;s Congressional Record averages 272 pages, so printing 2500 of them A DAY is 500,000 pages. At that point, you&#x27;d be worrying about how many inkjet <i>printers</i> you were throwing away every day...

IT perspective:<p>Interesting and subtle change. However it will likely be net negative. Most high volume copiers&#x2F;printers are laser and&#x2F;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.<p>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.

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&#x27;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.<p>Think about it: for the sake of optimizing ink use, the trivial solution is 1) Use the smallest font sizes possible 2) Use the &#x27;thinnest&#x27; 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? :)

Personally I prefer the original font. The thicker letters would likely photocopy better too.<p>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&#x27;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.<p>I&#x27;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&#x27;ve heard that perhaps they break your printer faster than original cartridges but if this is true when I&#x27;m happy to just spend the extra £40 ever few years to just buy a new printer. I&#x27;ll still have saved far more than that on ink alone (I print quite a lot).<p>If anything perhaps this is the solution to cheaper printing instead?<p>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 <i>never</i> run out of ink. Apparently this is quite common in Korea although I&#x27;ve never seen it before or since myself in the UK. From googling it was something like this: <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/PrinterKnow%C2%AE-Compatible-Continuous-Expression-18/dp/B00E20X2M2/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1396019217&amp;sr=8-6&amp;keywords=Continuous+ink+system" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.co.uk&#x2F;PrinterKnow%C2%AE-Compatible-Continu...</a> Although they had much larger ink containers. It seems it&#x27;s called a &quot;continuous ink system&quot;.<p>It&#x27;s pretty cool to look into anyway, even if you don&#x27;t do a huge amount of printing.

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&#x27;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.

How about: &quot;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&#x2F;voters, and have the warm glow of doing your alloted job to some minimum standard&quot;.

Same idea, widely ridiculed - <a href="http://www.ecofont.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ecofont.com</a>

The government isn&#x27;t going to abandon printing entirely, ever. There are too many people who need access to documents who don&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;m sorry, but paper is here to stay for a very long time.

The US Government could probably save substantially more by not printing blacked out pages like this for public hearings: <a href="http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lnbfetnw5V1qbqm2bo1_r1_250.gif" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;25.media.tumblr.com&#x2F;tumblr_lnbfetnw5V1qbqm2bo1_r1_250...</a><p>900 pages of this at 5:10 in this 2011 Daily Show clip. <a href="http://thedailyshow.cc.com/videos/1mdpat/the-fast-and-the-furious---mexico-grift" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;thedailyshow.cc.com&#x2F;videos&#x2F;1mdpat&#x2F;the-fast-and-the-fu...</a>

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

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.

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.<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot_matrix_printing#NLQ" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Dot_matrix_printing#NLQ</a>

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

Previously considered by the University of Wisconsin Green Bay: <a href="http://nowiknow.com/an-inkling-for-ink/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;nowiknow.com&#x2F;an-inkling-for-ink&#x2F;</a>

While it may look better on paper, in the sample in article I&#x27;d much rather be reading a form printed with Times New Roman than Garamond. Seems a bit easier to read

Sounds like a good idea! While we&#x27;re on it we could also focus on modernizing the overall bureaucracy by moving most services online.<p>Edit: Removed &quot;Instead of&quot;, clarity

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&#x27;t pick the new font up, handling complaints from people that the new font is too hard to see...<p>Not to say it&#x27;s not a good idea, there&#x27;s just potentially a lot of side effects.

There are legal requirements to publish many things as Paper, so the Fed will be in the business of printing for a long time.<p>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 &quot;weight&quot; lower wouldn&#x27;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.<p>To this end I&#x27;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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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&#x27;t lent to another group in the next 35 years the proposed budget will account for that.

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

Kudos on thinking outside the box.<p>My $0.02 on why this wouldn&#x27;t fly- he&#x27;s examining the problem from a bird&#x27;s eye view, ie, the entire government expenditure.<p>Documents, however, are printed by teams, usually small one&#x27;s for whom even a 30% ink savings wouldn&#x27;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&#x27;ve been a part of, a lead will look at a document printed in Garamond, proclaim he doesn&#x27;t like it&#x2F;can&#x27;t read it, and ask for it to be reprinted in readable format.

I shared this with my students. We&#x27;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

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&#x27;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.<p>I suspect that when printing at scale, the cost of ink varying by font matters little or nothing. It&#x27;s certainly less important than other considerations in choosing a font: ease of reading, what tone it sets, etc.

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.

How could there possibly be &quot;no&quot; to this from the Fed. Govt? If you don&#x27;t need to print, then don&#x27;t print. If you print, then print in a way that saves ink &#x2F; toner. Why not? How could the Federal Government possibly object? It&#x27;s a &quot;Yes And&quot; solution (to use Improv Comedy lingo). If you need to print, do it in a way that saves money. There&#x27;s no reason not to.

Rather than attempt to get millions of people to manually change fonts, just make &quot;Skimpy Print&quot; a layer that fits in between the print button &amp; the printer driver?<p><a href="http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Skimpy_20Print_20Default" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.halfbakery.com&#x2F;idea&#x2F;Skimpy_20Print_20Default</a><p>BTW: More ink is saved by image detection &amp; changes than fonts. And, this is all half-baked.

There&#x27;s always going to be a more efficient way, but when nobody else is doing anything actionable, who cares?<p>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.

This was done by the UW-Green Bay years ago (among many, many others, I&#x27;m sure) and was featured in Dan Lewis&#x27; &quot;Now I Know&quot; newsletter about a week ago. ( <a href="http://nowiknow.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;nowiknow.com&#x2F;</a> )<p>Still a worthwhile thing to report, I guess, but somehow manages to still be very &quot;the media is clueless&quot;

Garamond also looks good. I hate Times New Roman.

Actually I think a better cancel options built into printers &#x2F; 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.<p>And is it really necessary these days that Acrobat comes up with a different print dialog from Firefox, which is different from another one?

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

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.

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... &quot;Meh, fuck it&quot;, I learned...

That is the highest price for ink and not the price that government&#x27;s or companies who buy in bulk pay.

Why not just switch to this? <a href="http://pro.sony.com/bbsc/ssr/show-digitalpaper/resource.solutions.bbsccms-assets-show-digitalpaper-digitalpaper.shtml" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pro.sony.com&#x2F;bbsc&#x2F;ssr&#x2F;show-digitalpaper&#x2F;resource.solu...</a>

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

Just as an exercise, do Ctrl+F in your browser and count how many &quot;but&quot; there are in this thread.<p>He&#x27;s a good kid, but..<p>It&#x27;s nice, but..<p>The &quot;yes, but&quot; men attack. The knack to find problems in each solution..

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.

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.

When he&#x27;ll be 18, he&#x27;ll start seeing that it&#x27;s easier to change the government than convincing government to change anything.

Can we redo this study with Comic Sans MS?

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

Or use <a href="http://www.ecofont.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ecofont.com&#x2F;</a>

two things:<p>1. is garamond less legible after photocopying than tnr?<p>2. why not choose a sans serif font. serifs are wasting ink.

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

Let&#x27;s build a smarter planet.

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

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

This topic just irks me, it&#x27;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).<p>- If they would use something like InDesign they could print everything in 50% Black and could instantly save 50% no matter what.<p>- Even worse is <i>Rich Black</i>[1] printing which wastes 3 times the amount of ink&#x2F;toner namely CMY instead of K (black).<p>- 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.<p>- 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&#x2F;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&#x27;s initial cost and is also superior to color laser printing.‡<p>Here is the actual study: <a href="http://emerginginvestigators.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Mirchandani-2013.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;emerginginvestigators.org&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2013&#x2F;05&#x2F;...</a><p>This study completely omits to differentiate between text and graphic type printing yet makes this quite thoughtful remark:<p><i>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</i><p>Let the kids have <i>Comic Sans</i> 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&#x2F;5 * 3 Colors) the amount of ink than a simple text page.<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_black" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Rich_black</a><p>[2] <a href="http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr.-Grauert-Brief" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;de.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Dr.-Grauert-Brief</a> [German DIN Standard Test Letter]<p>‡ <a href="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/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;venturebeat.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;03&#x2F;24&#x2F;hps-new-enterprise-ink-bas...</a> (ballpark figure for original HP colored inks here is $100&#x2F;100ml compared to up to above $500&#x2F;100ml for consumer grade ink portions)

400 million saved is 400 million removed from the economy, isn&#x27;t it?

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

Of course, the ink-sellers would just promptly raise their prices. But, it&#x27;s still a very creative way to approach the budget issue.