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Comment by johngalt | Hacker News Reader

IT perspective:

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.

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I was just thinking that there was no analysis of the cost to roll out Garamond to all the machines and software in the federal government – I imagine it would be quite expensive.

It is apparent you have not written many grant applications. :-)

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.

My recollection is that, for a given point size, Garamond uses fewer pages, not just less ink.

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.

as contracts expire, market forces will come into play. Their vendor should be selling them "Use this font and we'll cut your cost by $1M" (and pocket the diff).

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