Student, 14, comes up with a way to save US millions

As part of a science fair project, 14-year-old wiz Suvir Mirchandani began studying fonts, and came up with a paper on how his country (United States) can save millions of dollars a year just by using Garamond instead of Times New Roman.

According to CNN, he collected some of his teachers' assignments and determined how much ink was used for each of the most popular fonts: Times New Roman, Century Gothic, Comic Sans and the much thinner Garamond.

A graph of ink usage revealed that if his school district relied solely on Garamond, ink consumption would be reduced by 24 per cent, saving as much as $21,000 a year, elitedaily.com also reports.

A teacher told Suvir to try to get his findings published in the Journal of Emerging Investigators, a publication founded by a group of Harvard graduate students that provides a forum for work of young students.

JEI asked Suvir to apply the same cost calculating methods to the federal government, which spends about $1.8 billion on printing a year.

The teen ran his tests on five sample pages from documents on the Government Printing Office and concluded that if the federal government used only Garamond, it could save nearly $136 million a year.

Add another $234 million if state governments did the same thing.

"They can't convert everything to a digital format; not everyone is able to access information online. Some things still have to be printed," Mirchandani argues.

So, the next time you want to print something, try using Garamond instead of other fonts, and you might save yourself some ink money in the long run.

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