Teen to government: Change your typeface, save millions
Me to grassroots: Change your typeface, save thousands or be able to print a LOT more!!!!
If Kinko's or a commercial printer does your printing, this could be used to negotiate a better price.
as a reminder for those that inkjet campaign materials, this strategy kills home printers and is expensive, so activists end up with less money to donate or spend on materials. Ideally, you want to get a used/referb, heavy duty (business) printer. There are several that accept bulk ink feeders. This is ideally what you want. Ink is cheapest when bought by the gallon and paper cheapest when bought by the pallet and cut to size.
Another reason to avoid home inkjets is a scummy tactic most printer manufacturers use, where they will default to multi-color printing and when printing black only, they will print the more expensive colored ink as part of the black. Some will refuse to function even in non-printing applications if any ink cartridge is empty. For this reason, a black only printer is ideal.
OK, highlights from the article:
http://edition.cnn.com/2014/03/27/li...ols/index.html
"Ink is two times more expensive than French perfume by volume," Suvir says with a chuckle
He's right: Chanel No. 5 perfume costs $38 per ounce, while the equivalent amount of Hewlett-Packard printer ink can cost up to $75.
So Suvir decided to focus his project on finding ways to cut down on the costly liquid.
Collecting random samples of teachers' handouts, Suvir concentrated on the most commonly used characters (e, t, a, o and r).
First, 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.
Next he enlarged the letters, printed them and cut them out on cardstock paper to weigh them to verify his findings. He did three trials for each letter, graphing the ink usage for each font.
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.
...
Fankhauser said Suvir's findings were so clear, simple and well thought-out, it had the peer reviewers at JEI asking, "How much potential savings is really out there?"
For the answer, JEI challenged Suvir to apply his project to a larger scale: the federal government.
With an annual printing expenditure of $1.8 billion, the government was a much more challenging task than his school science project.
Suvir repeated his tests on five sample pages from documents on the Government Printing Office website and got similar results -- change the font, save money.
...
Using the General Services Administration's estimated annual cost of ink -- $467 million -- Suvir concluded that if the federal government used Garamond exclusively it could save nearly 30% -- or $136 million per year. An additional $234 million could be saved annually if state governments also jumped on board, he reported.
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-t
