Pater Familias

Theories, observations, and articles, by Philip Schaefer · All posts · Categories

SAVING MONEY ON FONTS.

March 29, 2014 at 4:58 PM · Uncategorized

SAVING MONEY ON FONTS. I have seen discussions of fonts in terms of aesthetics and legibility, but not costs. This article by Mike Krumboltz on Yahoo News tells about how a 14-year-old student, Suvir Mirchandani, did look at fonts from this point of view. He determined that some fonts use more ink than others. He compared the amount of ink used for the frequently used letters r, a, e, o , and t, and estimated that his school district could save $21,000 a year by adopting the Garamond type face. Suvir estimated that the federal government could save $136 million a year by switching exclusively to Garamond. This post on the Typophile blog says that there are actually a number of variants of the Garamond font. This wikipedia entry shows examples of the Garamond font. Footnote 5 to the wikipedia article leads to this article by Amit Agarwal, which compares the use of ink by a variety of fonts. Garamond came out as the least cost with Comic Sans using the most ink.