New font, less money

Kevin Begos has an Associated Press story about a smart kid:

A teenager has published a study suggesting the Federal government could save millions of dollars a year in printing costs by switching to a thinner typeface that uses less ink.
Suvir Mirchandani, only fourteen, said he noticed there was plenty of talk at school about saving paper and he wondered about saving ink. Mirchandani, who lives in the township of O'Hara, just outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, said that the idea began when he was in middle school and he "noticed that some teachers used heavier fonts" for printing. He said he was already interested in graphic design and used a software program to estimate how much ink different typefaces, or fonts, used. "The data was really surprising to me," he said of how the differences added up, even for the printing done by his school district.
He expanded the study to look at potential savings by the Federal government, and a new paper on his research was published this month in the Journal of Emerging Investigators, a peer-reviewed journal created for promising middle and high school students. He found that the Office of Management and Budget had already estimated that Federal agencies would spend almost two billion dollars in printing for this year and that ink was more expensive than paper on a per-page basis.
In his paper, A Simple Printing Solution to Aid Deficit Reduction, Mirchandani analyzed five documents produced by five US government agencies and estimated how much ink would be used with three typefaces: Garamond, Times New Roman, and Century Gothic. The analysis estimated that using twelve-point Garamond would save about thirty percent in ink costs.
Mirchandani said his school district looked at the idea but hasn't been able to implement the switch. "It didn't really catch on," he said. "I understand it's hard to make this kind of a change." Still, he's happy that his work succeeded in "even just creating an awareness" of how much ink different typefaces use.
The Government Printing Office has praised Mirchandani's work, and said it will review the printing suggestion.

Rico says he likes Garamond, and hopes they make the change (but not to the bold; it uses more ink)...