The following appears in The MFP Report by Brian Bissett

You know the old PR mantra, “There’s no bad press as long as they spell your name right.” These days it’s hard for anything to do with printing — at least the stodgy 2D variety — to get in the news. So it was oddly interesting to see headlines everywhere in March about an amazing new “discovery.” An intrepid 14-year old had determined that switching fonts on government documents to Garamond could cut toner and ink use by 29%. And by exploiting those savings at the federal, state and local levels, the country could save up to $467 million each year. Easy.

It was a story made for today’s 24-hour news cycle: a precocious student with gumption; implications of willful government waste; and a one-size-fits-all solution that anyone can understand. Who could ask for anything more? What are we waiting for? Go Garamond or go home!

While not taking anything away from this obviously bright and highly motivated student (Suvir Mirchandani from the Pittsburgh area), this story says a lot less about printing than it does about what’s wrong with today’s news business and how this country looks at complex problems.

It’s like the rising obesity epidemic. Who needs to understand complicated causes and imperfect solutions? Just go for the grapefruit diet … or the cabbage soup diet, chicken soup diet, lemonade diet, chocolate diet, cookie diet, natto diet, etc.

At least this young man was thinking about printing and the economic implications of print. Not a lot of his peers or elders ever do. The far bigger problem is how no one in the media — outside of a few esoteric hardcopy aficionados — bothered to think, question, research, or analyze the topic. Nor did any of these folks spend more than a minute (if that) actually reading the study in question. By the way, it can be found in the March 6 Journal of Emerging Investigators.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the student’s font study was very narrowly focused. He considered only whether it would be better for government to switch all output exclusively to Garamond, rather than some combination of Times New Roman, Century Gothic and Garamond. These fonts are apparently the ones the US Government Printing Office recommends. On the other hand, the investigation was sufficiently prescient to consider the downstream effect of people printing government documents distributed as PDF files.

Having said this, there were some important flaws in the study, although they wouldn’t necessarily be apparent to a “civilian.” Foremost is the fact that 12-point Garamond type is objectively smaller than 12-point Times New Roman or Century Gothic. The explanation goes back to moveable lead type, and the fact that point size

measures the distance between lines of type, rather than the height of each character. In fact, the toner and ink savings attributed by this study mostly derive from the fact that Garamond characters are simply smaller. A similar outcome could be achieved by using 11-point Times New Roman, which produces output more similar in size to 12-point Garamond. And don’t
forget the unintended consequences of
smaller type. Such text can be more difficult to read … and to photocopy or scan.

There’s no reason a fonts-only supply-
saving strategy should be limited to just
three typefaces. A lot of fonts are far
more svelte than Garamond. Some even
have cute names, like Raleway Thin,
 Existence Light and Disco Regular. Better
yet, why not use a font that’s light on the touch and compressed, too, like Romeo Skinny. It even sounds cool, like a TV detective. But printer beware, as with fad
diets, some fonts that sound oh so skinny — think Diet Angst or Tainted Diet — really aren’t.

Then there are some special eco-friendly fonts with tiny holes in the characters that save on toner and ink. There’s also software that eliminates overlapping dots when printing letters, and other software that revamps pages to be more efficient. And most of these options can be used with the toner-saver mode on a printer or MFP, or they can be paired with software that lets you dial back the amount of toner or ink on a page.

I wouldn’t expect the press to delve deeper into the great gift of Garamond, but why have hardcopy vendors and their PR teams been so silent? Instead of crickets, every one of them should have been calling, e-mailing and Tweeting news folks with much more insightful talking points about how organizations today can really reduce the cost and impact of print. It’s like weight-loss vendor Herbalife. Regardless of what one thinks about the substance of their business, it’s hard to beat their omnipresent “Lose Weight Now, Ask Me How” bumper stickers and ads.

Meanwhile, every hardcopy vendor, MFP dealer and industry analyst can agree how challenging it is these days to get customers to think much about their printing, let alone to open their eyes — and wallets — to consider more holistic approaches to documents, output and workflow. This flash-in-the pan news story about fonts provided the perfect

segue. While the story has now come and gone, every MFP salesperson should be equipped immediately with a talk track that begins, “Remember that story in the news about saving money by switching fonts?”

The MFP Report: Business Intelligence for Manufacturers, Suppliers, Sellers & Supporters of Multifunction Peripherals