Teen to government: Change your typeface, save millions
cnn.com
cnn.com
I don't... how do I put this nicely.
This is a kid. He is smart. He looked at the problem from a new angle. He came up with a nice hack. Presumably we want more kids with more of a hacking spirit.
I hope he doesn't read Hacker News.
Computers are great, but doesn't mean that they are the solution to every problem.
Also, given how fast the printing press prints and how many times a printed document can be read and for how long it can be stored, I'm not sure it actually is more electricity to print.
Then there's another problem. Try fetching electronic document from 50 years ago. What? You don't have tape reading machine? You are not even sure which format it is in? Oops. Now try looking at a printed document from 500 years ago. Provided it does not physically degrade, can be read pretty easily. You can see Gutenberg's bible in the Library of Congress and you don't need anything to perceive information there. How much of today's electronic info would it be possible to read in 550 years?
If the encoding standards are non-proprietary and you either kept data stored in a linear binary format compatible with modern persistent file encoding, or just translated the works over time, then all of them.
All ODF / PDF files should be readable in 500 years. You can back them up for minimal cost in facilities around the world, and since the specifications to render them are completely open standards, you can (at worst) write software to interpret them again if necessary.
When dead tree rots, it rots. You had to (painstakingly) transcribe dead tree papers over and over to insure they don't degrade. We already have ROM archive tape standards meant to last millenia in the absence of environmental decay of their containments.
And, of course, magnetic media can degrade and be physically destroyed as well as dead tree media. There are standards for long-term storage, but most of the info is not stored that way. We find most routine documents from thousand years ago written on paper, cloth, leather, bark, papyrus, etc. but today's routine information would never survive even a century, only specially preserved data - a tiny minority of it - would.
In many cases, agencies cannot simply stop printing because they are legally required by congress to put stuff on paper. Agencies cannot compel congress to fix badly written legislation but they can change their default font. Where I come from, cost-savings that don't require an act of congress are called good ideas.
(PS there are probably other considerations such as accessibility for the visually impaired that I don't know enough about.)
If, like most Americans, you prepare your tax return in the next couple of weeks - an annual ritual which involves a truly mind-boggling amount of printed paper - take a look at the fonts on IRS documents. Almost invariably, the IRS uses thin Sans Serif fonts. As do a great many other government printing departments.
Now I don't expect the kid to think about this since he probably hasn't had to fill out a tax return yet, being only 14. But perhaps it's the sort of thing CNN ought to have mentioned, or asked the Government Printing Office about, if they were interested in presenting useful news. Of course, they're not, in this case; it's clickbait which relies on readers accepting all the assumptions in the article and patting themselves on the back for feeling smarter than Uncle Sam.
Maybe if the tax return is really complex and most of the software can not handle it you'd have to go back to paper. But for vast number of Americans, tax returns are simple enough.
And it's entirely debatable which is better: seeing your argument trigger a wave of patronising good-on-yous from adults you respect; or seeing your argument trigger a wave of intriguing discussion between the same.
I agree that we should be encouraging and not dismissive of it, but the kid is 14, he's nearly an adult himself. He can handle being exposed to deeper analysis.
"If you stand up and announce a new idea, hundreds if not thousands of armchair quarterbacks will tell you why your idea is wrong / how they could do it better / why they are smarter than you"
or
"Good job thinking critically about an issue that literally millions of people have taken for granted for years and trying to come up with out-of-the-box solutions, backed by actual quantitative research."?
Personally, I want to communicate the second. Will he have to learn that solving problems involves creating ideas and then iterating on those ideas, sometimes tearing the original idea to shreds in the process? Yes. Will he need to learn to divorce himself from his work and not feel that criticism of his work devalues him as a person? Yes.
But some (not all) of the HN comments, while critical, do not feel exceptionally constructive. Too often, when some unique or innovative new idea is touted, smart people rush to explain why it won't work or why it's not actually that great an idea or why it's solving the wrong problem in the first place. But none of these people are actually helping to solve the problem. It is important for us to have this talk about fixing the frankly toxic attitude that seems to pervade this space sometimes. And it's important not to hide behind the shield of "constructive criticism" when the criticism is less constructive and more just petty.
I am all for going paperless as much as possible, but think of the back of your toothpaste container and the warnings printed there. Could there be both a savings and an environmental impact in using a better font?
edit: There is some confusion; this was a response to parents "More importantly, this opens it up a new approach that can be used in lots of places.", not to the article. It doesn't really open anything up.
I think it was a fine school project, fwiw.
It's the spirit behind that counts. It can lead to other interesting hacking endeavors down the road in that young man's life.
As a somewhat related anecdote I was repeatedly told by my professors that in Physics everything is named after the last person to discover it, not the first.
(ref. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Leon...)
I understood this as a story about hacker spirit in a kid, and it made me smile.
[1]: If he did already know, and presented this idea as his own? He may not be a great hacker, but he has a promising future as a manager.
Or, if this actually leads to adoption, a salesman.
"If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas. Most of them will be wrong, and what you have to learn is which ones to throw away."
- Linus PaulingAs an example, these links are all 2010 or earlier.
http://www.cnet.com/uk/news/the-right-font-can-save-you-mone... http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1256396... http://www.sitepoint.com/cut-costs-by-saving-ink-with-ecofon...
etc.etc.
It's the same objection you'd have if CNN posted a story about "kid uses physical model to predict lava distribution from volcano using baking soda and vinegar".
I find that more and more often I think of something, then search on the internet, and if I see that someone somewhere has done anything similar, I abandon the project immediately. After all, it's been done, so what's the point?
Net result if we push this to an extreme: instead of pursuing interesting ideas people end up wasting time in useless discussions on Hacker News, thus adding exactly zero value and failing to move humanity forward.
At a first approximation, everything has been tried by someone. It is very, very rare to have a truly groundbreaking idea. But that's not a problem! Humanity advances mostly through incremental improvements, not just by giant leaps.
So stop criticizing and start doing.
Sometimes, though it's the other way around. This has been done, but it still sucks so I'm going to do it better. Or sometimes, it's been done and works great for these people but not for me, so I'm going to make it better for my use case.
It goes both ways.
Be fair: the internet also gave us the first version.
Or you learn how much progress has been made on the subject you're researching and, standing on the shoulders of giants, make new independent discoveries based on what has already been found.
It's not the Internet's fault if most people don't have the right mindset for research.
What's frustrating is the complete lack of historical context to most things on the internet. There is one version: current, and everything previous is deprecated. Is this kid aware of every similar attempt to alter typography to save ink? Probably not. Should we throw him under the bus for being ignorant? Probably not.
What I see when I close my eyes is a community that assumes the OP might be right. That's all it takes, the presumption that this person, as young/Blubby/naive as they are, can find a better route up the mountain. I think it just takes patience &/ humility.
There are lots of people in the world smarter then you (and me). This might be humbling, but this can also be used to your advantage.
Instead of being sad about someone having had already invented what you thought about, build upon it! It's magic: you just thought about it, and it already exists, often ready to be used. Use it and build the next level. Pick the ready-made wheels, steel beams, a motor, and build something new, say, a car.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monomyth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Basic_Plots
Therefore, it is in fact your comment that is more disrespectful to the kid than the other comments which are pointing out flaws with his proposal.
You could take any font with both "normal" and "light" weights, and then apply the leading and pair-kerning from the normal weight to the light weight, to produce a font that reflows text the same as the normal weight, but uses the ink of the light weight. I do wonder whether the results would cause typographers to gag, though.
This is a huge cost. Consider the U.S. Army, one part of the much larger Department of Defense. The Army has literally thousands of pre-prepared forms [1] and manuals. It's likely that these forms get printed hundreds of thousands of times per day. You could indeed save a lot of ink by switching to Garamond but that means that each form needs to be re-done. Some are simple MS Word forms where it might be easy. Others are PDFs and most are XFL (awful Lotus Forms), all of which will take a major effort to convert. Multiply that time and effort across an entire government's worth of forms and the effort required is mind-boggling. It would take many years for this to pay off.
In the military/government, forms, publications, and manuals are regularly updated, distributed, and printed. Rolling out a new font on each update before distribution wouldn't be a huge task.
But realistically, not a good idea. Garamond uses less ink because it is skinnier and less readable. It's a font for young eyes, or for Apple customers (long time user of Garamond).
Using slightly more literate ways to call critics "haters" is not any more constructive.
I hope he does, it's a good measure of the average hacker.
Yes, this kid is smart, and smart is good. But smarter is better. I don't understand the problem.
Unfortunately the two are not the same.
of course, the same could be said for changing the font, but hey, baby steps.
ps: i don't actually agree with the font switch idea. less ink means lower readability in marginal situations (at night, after photocopying 3x, etc etc)
http://www.reddit.com/r/geek/comments/21la0q/14_yr_old_stude...
but with no trace of sneering - it congratulates the kid on a good idea, and points out that ecofont does it and better.
contrast this hn comment saying exactly the same thing
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7487637
but with a far more condescending tone.
Rather, we need young impressive minds to solve real problems. Government spending is intentional.
If he doesn't get that, he's more likely to end up building pointless boondoggles for the government rather than solving real problems.
Most offices that I've seen use laser printers. Toner isn't cheap but it's cheaper by several orders of magnitude over the ink in an inkjet printer they're using for the comparison here.
the GPO's efforts to become more environmentally sustainable were focused on shifting content to the Web.
This is the right answer. It's a permanent solution to a long-term problem.
Teen to government: Change your typeface, save millions
What he's really saying is: "Spend millions changing your typeface, maybe save millions." There are laws that dictate how forms and paper must appear. Changing the font could have many unintended consequences that will need to be studied and tested for, probably by high-priced consultants. And of course you'll have to test if the new forms are as readable by low-vision citizens and people with other disabilities.
But have to hand it to a 14 year old at least thinking about this stuff.
True, but this doesn't actually matter. A lot of toner will still be being bought by schools & governments, and that toner could be used more efficiently by the font switch this student describes.
Additionally, if you take the annual budget a school spends on toner, and take the % less ink used by Garamond than Times New Roman (which could have been calculated using inkjets), you'll end up with the real saving figure, which we can safely assume will be non-trivial.
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However, a school or small business may read this and save thousands this year.
So generally: Mass-printed forms you can save ink based on font. Office printing, maybe.
And, yes, ink does get much much cheaper in bulk. If the savings calculations are based on consumer inkjet prices, they're way inflated.
We see a savings of $400 million and think "we should do this!" But it's a drop in the bucket even if it were that much of a savings.
If each government employee needs to change their font, or needs to set it as the default font, or needs technical support to configure the defaults in their word processor. If IT needs to modify images to use this font as a default. Just these actions are going to cost a significant portion of that $400 million when you consider it across the millions of federal staff.
This also assumes things like the government is actually paying for ink or toner in quantity, instead of, for instance, holding a contract with Xerox who charges per impression rather than based on how much ink you use.
It also assumes that there is no difference in legibility between the fonts. That people with vision impairments will not have difficulty with reading the document.
An easy way to think about whether an initiative like this is reasonable is to think about whether it makes a lot of sense for any individual to do. Do you think you, individually, could realize any significant savings by changing your fonts? If it only makes sense when millions of people do it at once, and even then only when certain assumptions are met, and then only saves a few dollars per person per year, then it actually is more likely to cost a lot more in overhead to make sure it happens than it will ever save.
Yes, everything is a drop in the bucket when looking at the Federal bugdet and the current debt of 17.5 trillion [1]. However, a 14 year old kid has a well thought out and proven plan to save money. Where do you recommend we start? The drops fill up the bucket faster than you think.
- It's not just that it's a "drop in the bucket", but that the savings will just be spend on some other frivolous project when Congress looks at the budget. (It ain't going to science grants, I can tell you that.)
Drops in the bucket can at least accumulate, and then grow exponentially over time (when applied to debt). But when you just blow any savings, that doesn't work.
- You don't even need to jump to legibility or vision impairment problems: simple "weirdness" issues will balloon the cost. Politically influential benefit recipients might not like "everything looking different" on their Social Security check statements, and push back.
If it is possible reduce costs in many different areas of Government spending, wouldn't the savings add up to a significant amount?
I don't know if this is a minority viewpoint, but I believe that constant improvement is necessary for the betterment of our society. It's definitely a slippery slope, one could argue that rehashing the same things leads to beating a dead horse - but as technology changes and improvement happens in a multitude of different fields, the overall savings of this improvement would be unknown.
While human beings are fallible, I don't see why this suggestion isn't something to look more closely at from those with authority in the matter.
Second, intentionally or otherwise, he managed to divorce the savings ratio from the type of ink being used--whether you laser-print, inkjet-print, or press-print your text on paper, you're going to use x% less ink or toner with one font versus another.
However, the selection of a font should take things into consideration besides the relative amount of ink needed to produce a body of text. Human and machine readability should also be significant concerns. And I would like to point out that a cost savings of $136 million represents less than two seconds worth of spending at the US governments current spend rate of $3.5 trillion per year. I don't know about anyone else, but I can't even imagine that level of spending!
I should have said 20.45 minutes, not 1.## seconds. Mea culpa. It's still not a huge savings, comparatively.
At this point, it's not about comparatively. Optimising $240m a year is so fucking good when it's a short switch. Low hanging fruit.
How do you optimise your apps? "Oh, this 100ms optimisation that is a one-pointer is comparatively not worth it, let's not do it"?
You probably don't have teenage children.
There is a whole class of typefaces optimized for high speed, low cost/low quality printing, which pre-compensates the letterform for expected ink bleeding, so called Ink Traps[1][2]. They are highly optimized for a specific printing method, the font size and the paper-quality used, and don't translate well to non-ink based printing.
The problem with current desktop publishing fonts is that they can't possibly be optimized for every single use case on screen and for all of the myriad types of printing so robustness while maintaining legibility is key. Especially if the product is expected to be photocopied I would always go for a reasonable bolder weight, uncondensed typeface rather than losing information.
Also make sure the 8 is distinct enough from a 6 [3] (Times New Roman beats Arial by lengths in this aspect)
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ink_trap
[2] http://designmind.frogdesign.com/blog/calculated-errors-the-...
[3] http://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres_...
Interesting and subtle change. However it will likely be net negative. Most high volume copiers/printers are laser and/or covered by a cost per copy maintenance agreement. Meaning that most organizations pay the same price for a page regardless of how much toner is used on that page.
Contrast this with the cost of enforcing a single font family across millions of systems and documents. There are a large number of unseen costs here. Imagine 10 years from now some vendor responding to an RFP for healthcare.gov v2.0. The government insisting that the source code be converted to garamond for the weekly status reports. The HN posts that day will be about how ridiculous of a requirement this is.
I often switched from Times New Roman to Garamond when I needed to squeeze extra text in under the page limit, back when I was in school.
For example, from the NIH (https://grants.nih.gov/grants/writing_application.htm):
Remember the Details! Below are tips to assist you in meeting the requirements on font, font size, margins and spacing. Be sure to follow the format in the instructions and label sections as requested.
Use an Arial, Helvetica, Palatino Linotype, or Georgia typeface, a black font color, and a font size of 11 points or larger. (A Symbol font may be used to insert Greek letters or special characters; the font size requirement still applies.)
Type density, including characters and spaces, must be no more than 15 characters per inch. Type may be no more than six lines per inch. Use standard paper size (8 ½" x 11) . Use at least one-half inch margins (top, bottom, left, and right) for all pages. No information should appear in the margins.
Think about it: for the sake of optimizing ink use, the trivial solution is 1) Use the smallest font sizes possible 2) Use the 'thinnest' font that arguably uses the least ink. However optimizing a single varible in this way is clearly not desirable, because it defeats the goal of printing documents. A document is meant for someone to read, no? :)
I use a Brother printer that cost me £40 2-4 years ago. I can buy 20 cartridges from Amazon that work perfectly for just £12.90 with shipping on Amazon Prime. That's 65p each. A single original Brother cartridge can easily cost £16.44 from Amazon or £7.62 each when bought in a pack of 4 (I think the largest quantity they sell together). So these copy cartridges are over 10x cheaper.
I've used them ever since I got this printer with no ill effects. The printer still makes create printouts and prints photos great too. I've heard that perhaps they break your printer faster than original cartridges but if this is true when I'm happy to just spend the extra £40 ever few years to just buy a new printer. I'll still have saved far more than that on ink alone (I print quite a lot).
If anything perhaps this is the solution to cheaper printing instead?
Also, random note. Once I went a Korean friends house and they had a normal inkjet printer with 4 gallons of ink in large pots of top of it. These had small tubes feeding down into the cartridges. They never had to replace the cartridges and they would never run out of ink. Apparently this is quite common in Korea although I've never seen it before or since myself in the UK. From googling it was something like this: http://www.amazon.co.uk/PrinterKnow%C2%AE-Compatible-Continu... Although they had much larger ink containers. It seems it's called a "continuous ink system".
It's pretty cool to look into anyway, even if you don't do a huge amount of printing.
Buying generic ink in bulk quantities is also much cheaper than individual cartridges (you can buy a whole LITRE of ink for the price of an original cartridge for some printers), and you can even dilute it a significant amount if you don't mind slightly reduced saturation - I've run 10:1 black dilution in my CIS and the output looks only very slightly greyish.
Some printers have EEPROMs on the cartridges to deter refilling/CIS systems but the Chinese have produced "modchips", self-resetting cartridges, etc. to get around this; some can even reflash the firmware, presumably with one that has all the checks patched out.
It does show plants growing from piles of coins. Is it a fertiliser?
900 pages of this at 5:10 in this 2011 Daily Show clip. http://thedailyshow.cc.com/videos/1mdpat/the-fast-and-the-fu...
Honestly, I prefer the paper version since it's less likely I'll ignore it.
It's not like these documents don't already exist in a digital format. The "challenge" would be maintaining the mailing list.
For the school the costs are probably greater in producing the letter - if any printing is required then the personnel costs are going to be approximately equal up to the point of direct distribution. Instead of sending 32 letters to each class (all classes are <32 in my kids school) then they will need to count the letters in to bundles and label for the class they are to be received by. The teacher/assistant will then need to consult a list to ensure the right students receive the letter, a potentially changing list, rather than simply give all students a letter to take.
Initially up take is likely to be low IMO. There will also be a lot of issues with parents not reading all letters or having technical problems. The letter-in-bag is very hard not to deliver for primary-age children and the school can look in the bag to see if it's gone - getting notice of email letters having been seen is possible but less robust IMO.
Currently my kid's school don't de-duplicate for siblings. They could do that and, I estimate, save may be ~10% of material costs immediately. I think the administration of that is similar to how you'd have to administer who isn't receiving letters by email.
Schools face another option - allow advertising on letters (which I generally disprove of FWIW). That way income is likely to dwarf the theoretical savings via reduced toner use.
So what? They already must have profiles on the kids, it's just an extra mark somewhere.
And also sending a kid home with info doesn't require parents to be tech adept or to check their email often which a good number of people don't.
Hence the choice...?
EDIT: Downvoters, rebutal? I worked at in 2 government offices, both heavily relied on paper.
I have a few friends that teach in Virginia, about 5 miles from DC, who've gone so far as to spend their pocket cash on Craigslist-found laptops so they have a few they can either have in the classroom or give to some of these families.
So, yes, your school does need paper to send information home.
That being said, my child's school offers the option of paperless, has a school blog and online calendar, and is technology-progressive.
On a personal note, I don't turn my computer on at home very often. I work all day in front of one, when I'm done, I'm done. :D
My husband is still living in the stoneage and doesn't use email. He actually has an email address, but doesn't check it, ever, not once in the last several years. He doesn't even know what's in his inbox. He pays his bills over the phone. My mother also doesn't use email, she never even got an email address until 2 years ago, and never uses it. She still pays all her bills with a paper check and snailmail. A growing number of children are being raised by their grandparents[1][2], thus an older generation.
Some people don't have internet access, nor do they even care to have internet access.
How should one know that the website is updated? Email? Well, you aren't going to get everyone to read their email. Text message? Many people don't have cellphones (especially old people), and if they did, I know several people who don't have a texting plan, so they'd be paying extra for those messages. Some people don't have cell service at home. My mother still can't figure out how to text, or if she's got a message. I know it seems simple, but she just doesn't get it. Phone calls? Well now you got a big infrastructure to build, test, and maintain for automatic phonecall system.
"Johnny has been doing inappropriate things in class" is somewhat sensitive information. If you want to put it on the web, you're going to have to create logins, passwords, make sure that it is up to security standards, and deal with parents who can't reset their password.
When I was going to primary school (over a decade ago!) the "IT facilities" were beyond outdated, poorly maintained, and just not up to par in any respect. We were still using floppy disks, which were an old technology even then. Are we going to update every school with the latest equipment? At taxpayers cost. Train the staff and teachers to use a new system? Maintain the infrastructure?
Not everyone lives their life online. Get out of your own worldview for a second.
Paper is easy, simple, and solves problems. If it isn't broken why fix it?
[1] http://www.prb.org/Publications/Articles/2012/US-children-gr...
[2] In an interesting twist, not that it has ever come up, but my mother once said she would love to raise her grandchildren. She gave her reasons as she is now older, thus much wiser. She has way way more money now then my siblings and I ever had growing up, so money issues wouldn't be a problem like it was when we were growing up. She is now retired, so she would have all the time needed.
She runs the mailing lists on a volunteer basis. Each classroom has a list. Each class list is subscribed to the grade list. Each grade list is subscribed to the all-school list. If this went across the whole district, the school lists would be subscribed to the district list.
All lists are moderated; they're used only for announcements.
Each year, the first flyer to come home is the "how to subscribe for your kids" sheet. The benefits are clear: less paper, faster delivery, no depending on the kids to pull it out of their backpacks to show you. The lunch menu goes out as a PDF. The PTO announces events that way.
Setting it up in the first place takes a couple hours and the cooperation of the school secretary; getting the school IT involved turned out to be a big lose. At the beginning of each year, there's an hour or two of reconfiguration -- new teachers, retiring teachers, that sort of thing.
If you don't sign up for it, you get paper. More than 80% of parents sign up.
Are you thinking, sure, you live in a fancy school system? No. More than half the kids who go to the elementary school qualify for free lunches. 78% of the US has internet access at home. Parents of school-age children disproportionately have cellphones and are willing to take email.
And no, you don't put "Johnny has been inappropriate in class" on mailing lists.
Fancy school to me. :)
100% of the children in my elementary school got free lunch. We didn't have recess or a playground because we couldn't afford it and there really wasn't a place to put a playground anyway.
From your figures, 20% of parents do not sign up and 22% of the US does not have internet at home. These are non-trivial numbers. Also, your wife runs the lists on a volunteer basis so the cost of her time is not accounted for. It's great that there's a system working for you but that doesn't mean it would work elsewhere.
Sometimes I want important messages to come via paper. I get through so many emails a day that one from school might easily get lost in a busy day whereas a letter would always stand out.
Who says paper isn't broken? The only argument I see for paper in your comment is that a segment of the population are unwilling to use anything else. According to available statistics on the matter, we can assume that is around 20%. What about the 20% who only use paper because we're not given any other option (I count myself among that group)? How did the first 20% become a more powerful group and why are the remaining 80% of us letting them hold us back from realizing the advantages of electronic systems?
You can put stuff on a website, but people must actively go there. You can email it, but not everyone checks their accounts daily. Or... you can print out a piece of paper and say "hey kid, give this to your parents!"
My school district spends about $250M/year. They spend about $100k on paper. Go optimize something that matters.
Government often seems less efficient than business because government entities don't have the option of dropping their most difficult customers or setting a cap on their cost-per-customer expense; they're mandated by law to serve everyone, which means they'll typically go for the cheapest solution with the greatest legal defensibility, like sending out notice on paper. Even if they wanted o abandon the paper system tomorrow, they have to get almost universal agreement among the public they serve before doing so.
I never really made any measurements, but I remember its documentation mentioned a savings of up to 40% of ink. The normal mode of the printer is NLQ [1], so it would be quite big when compare to NLQ.
I also remember the paper with tractor wheels and the possibilities for wasting paper. To print one page tended to need three sheets as the print head was some inches below the tractor wheels. To print that one page would require a form feed to get to the start of a page, another to get to the end of the printed page and a third form feed to make sure some paper was in the rollers. Brilliant printers though, I would prefer one for occasional printing rather than a dried out inkjet.
Edit: Removed "Instead of", clarity
Not to say it's not a good idea, there's just potentially a lot of side effects.
There will always be people whose workflows are interrupted by a new change, and legacy systems that don't like it for their own reasons. There are already systems in place to handle their complaints, because this is an expected part of any change in a large organisation, and is barely worth mentioning.
You underestimate how much money governments can spend on meetings :)
I think for this solution to work they should actually consider even more extreme type faces, font sizes, and shades of gray. How are we to know that just making the letters "weight" lower wouldn't have the same effect? Clearly we should commission a team of 12 experts to study which fonts cost the most to print, their legibility by a group of 100 Americans who represent the diverse age and backgrounds of American Citizens, and how fast they can read them, factoring their average wage to also value the man power cost of the new fonts.
To this end I'm submitting to my senator a proposal that outlines a $1 billion earmark for research in to the cost savings available through a mandate to use an alternate, but yet undetermined font. Additionally to avoid copyright issues on fonts, $4 billion will be set aside to find a team to create a new public domain font that will be accessible to anyone.
In as soon as 5 years we should have a new font selected, and as early as 2030 all new documents will be printed in the new font. Lastly all existing public works will be reprinted in the new font. We expect completion of this project by 2050.
By 2050 the war with Russia, and China should be over, and the United States of the Northern Hemisphere will be operating in only one language Chinglussian. All documents will be printed in this.
Adding the additional characters that Chinglussian requires should only cost another 8 Bitcoin. (the rate of inflation on BTC is expected to be practically infinite as all the worlds wealth packs in to 40M coins). We have already reserved those 8 Bitcoins, so as long as they aren't lent to another group in the next 35 years the proposed budget will account for that.
My $0.02 on why this wouldn't fly- he's examining the problem from a bird's eye view, ie, the entire government expenditure.
Documents, however, are printed by teams, usually small one's for whom even a 30% ink savings wouldn't make a dent compared to the money they spend elsewhere. Thus no motivation for each team, and thus no major movement to change behavior. If the teams are anything like ones that I've been a part of, a lead will look at a document printed in Garamond, proclaim he doesn't like it/can't read it, and ask for it to be reprinted in readable format.
I suspect that when printing at scale, the cost of ink varying by font matters little or nothing. It's certainly less important than other considerations in choosing a font: ease of reading, what tone it sets, etc.
Because there are other considerations with print besides ink/toner costs of printing. Like readability (including readability in the presence of real-world printing errors, since that means less chance of extra prints being made at additional cost.)
this whole story is based on the implicit assumption that nobody in the government has ever thought about this issue before. As so often, that assumption seems quite inaccurate.
Because legibility is more important than laser toner.
http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Skimpy_20Print_20Default
BTW: More ink is saved by image detection & changes than fonts. And, this is all half-baked.
Congrats to the kid, he got his 15 minutes of fame. I hope it will motivate him to continue improving this world. The benefit for the rest of us is that hopefully with all of this attention, someone more qualified will come along and actually start some significant changes.
Still a worthwhile thing to report, I guess, but somehow manages to still be very "the media is clueless"
And is it really necessary these days that Acrobat comes up with a different print dialog from Firefox, which is different from another one?
I have been visiting a newspaper printing factory and they said the ink price was a LOT LOT cheapear than the paper which cost a lot to them.
Ink is expensive for end-user consumers, not for big printing systems.
He's a good kid, but..
It's nice, but..
The "yes, but" men attack. The knack to find problems in each solution..
LCDs use about the same amount of energy to display blacks as they do whites.
Although there are energy savings with CRTs and OLED (don't most android phones use OLED? so that might be the new point of savings)
I would be very irritated if anybody handed me something with compromised readability (letters filled with holes) to save a fraction of a penny in toner.
I have noticed this numerous times, where something is sold as green, but at the end of the day, it produces more consumption, not less. Biofuels are a perfect example in my opinion, as they are just burning more crap and polluting the air. Only if the fuels are grown on what was previously concrete does the whole green argument about biofuels make any sense.
Now someone develops biofuels. Convert the tree to biofuels, and burns them. One less tree, more CO2 (generally a bad thing for the environment). Whats difficult to understand about that?
Now if you plant another tree on what was a piece of concrete, and burn that, THEN you have a zero sum game. I imagine most of the biofuels are being grown on lands which previously had (non-biofuel) plants growing rather than on concrete.
(So a tree does store carbon as it grows, but there is probably a sensible separation between a few hundred years in a tree and geologic carbon. "Biochar" is one idea towards sinking carbon, the charred material doesn't rot as quickly.)
But you can't do the same with fossil fuels - all fossil fuels are carbon releases, and that carbon is never recaptured by the process. The 'green argument' is that after setup, there is little in the way of new carbon being introduced, which is very much not the case with fossil fuels.
Separating your recyclable garbage doesn't mean you don't still generate non-recyclable garbage and throw that out, yet doing this has helped reduce strain on landfills and has had a host of other benefits. From your argument here, because we don't turn recyclables back into the original oil or wood they came from, it's not worth doing.
I guess it is a balance between having the carbon in / on the ground, or in the air in CO2 form. Encouraging people to burn biofuels will only put more of it in the air, or is there some evidence of less fossil fuels being burnt since biofuels were developed?
It is not zero sum because of depleting of soil's carbon pool and other resources.
In any case, it's still far, far better than having the entirety of the carbon in the fuel pulled fresh from long-term stores - the maligned 'green argument' above.
(edit: I am also a biologist by training, though not an ecologist as Unidan claims)
Yes, that would be the 6th word I wrote.
>Biofuels are a perfect example in my opinion
Biofuels are an awful example because biofuels are complicated. The carbon accounting for growing bio-fuel crops vs. food crops vs. not farming, vs. managing the land for environmental purposes.... the pollution accounting by replacing petroleum with bio-fuels... the complex production costs and effects. Some biofuels are certainly better than others, but I don't think anybody with domain knowledge would propose none of them have positive impact.
Reducing fuel consumption is a separate issue from choosing the best fuel source, conflating the two isn't productive.
1. is garamond less legible after photocopying than tnr?
2. why not choose a sans serif font. serifs are wasting ink.
- If they would use something like InDesign they could print everything in 50% Black and could instantly save 50% no matter what.
- Even worse is Rich Black[1] printing which wastes 3 times the amount of ink/toner namely CMY instead of K (black).
- That the costs of getting something printed by an actual print service company by printing press are surprisingly low given digital print ready delivery and break even pretty fast, especially for colored prints, where the quality is also vastly superior.
- any school or organization of similar or bigger size should use professional office grade black only laser printers for all default print jobs, which should keep cost way below 5 cents/page. At all costs stay away from consumer grade inkjet printers. And get only one! office grade Inkjet printer with big and per color replaceable cartridges which pretty fast compensates for it's initial cost and is also superior to color laser printing.‡
Here is the actual study: http://emerginginvestigators.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/...
This study completely omits to differentiate between text and graphic type printing yet makes this quite thoughtful remark:
In addition, fonts may be chosen with a specific purpose in mind (e.g. aesthetics), but posters and other graphical design in which font type could have meaningful impact would usually be printed on a color printer. Color toner ink costs for printing were not tested in this study. Another related way of saving ink is the following: when an assignment is photocopied from a book, a black border in the periphery is sometimes printed. This black border gets copied, leading to a large wastage of ink. “Whiting out” the black periphery would further reduce the ink usage in the school district. This impact would be in addition to what was investigated in this study
Let the kids have Comic Sans if they want to, but let them know what it cost what it needs to print their essays on inkjet printers on a rainbow colored background. Normal text covers only between 2.8%[2] to 5% of a page. In other ways a page with fully colored background can easily use more than 60 times (100/5 * 3 Colors) the amount of ink than a simple text page.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_black
[2] http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr.-Grauert-Brief [German DIN Standard Test Letter]
‡ http://venturebeat.com/2014/03/24/hps-new-enterprise-ink-bas... (ballpark figure for original HP colored inks here is $100/100ml compared to up to above $500/100ml for consumer grade ink portions)
http://www.bized.co.uk/learn/economics/markets/mechanism/int...
Ink and printers are complementary goods. A person can't buy whatever ink they want, they need the ink that goes with their printer. At the same time, if ink prices go up $5 per cartridge, few people will go out and buy an entirely new printer.
Consumer printers cost about the same as an ink cartridge or two. Consumers aren't "stuck" paying for more expensive ink if manufacturers decide to start screwing them on the price.
[edit: wanted to add this] Even with the ridiculously complementary goods of automobiles and gasoline, more expensive gas shifts consumer demand away from gas guzzlers.
But this is about the government, who most likely has a contract with a supplier, locking them in to their ink prices when they buy the printer.
And, if nothing else, getting approval to buy a printer will take longer and require more paper work than getting approval to buy ink.
Also, in the US, these contracts go to the lowest bidder. The bidding process is not exactly always the most honest and truly competitive.
The combination of these two things is why I fully expect ink prices to go up.