Garamond is an old style font, with serifs intended to mimic the original, chiseled ones and the thick-thin strokes of the letterforms. It also isn’t the most compact of fonts meaning that a given paragraph is going to be somewhat longer because the letters themselves are. Garamond also has a low x-height, which adversely affects legibility because the bodies of the lowercase letters are smaller.
In other words, if this was to be adopted, the cost benefit would be eaten up due to people enlarging the point size for better legibility, and in more paper used because the same amount of text would require more space.
I applaud the kid for thinking in this manner, though. Copier consumables, particularly toner, are an absolutely astounding expense when tallied up over time. Like cell phones, the profit isn’t in the thing itself, it’s derived from the longterm use of it.
This young man needs an IRS audit.
I have a better idea: stop printing stupid handouts.
I have long thought Garamond was a a more elegant font than Times New Roman in print. However, for web use a sans serif font like Tahoma is a more readable choice.
Government offices still use ink jet printers? No wonder everything they do takes so long.
Maybe FreeRepublic could save money by changing the font too?
Missing from analyses such as these is the true cost of documents. Ink and paper are trivial compared with the cost of composing, editing, and reading documents. The biggest savings, by far, in the production of documents is a decision, early on, to never produce the unnecessary ones in the first place.
75 dollars an ounce? I have an Idea!
Unfortunately the government could care less about saving money became it's not their money. It's taxpayer's money.