Indian origin boy's idea to save US $400m by changing font 'may not work at all'

Last week, 14-year-old Suvir Mirchandani was soaking up in the limelight after suggesting that the US govt. could save 400 million dollars by just changing font size, however, experts have said that may not be true at all.

FastCoDesign revealed that Mirchandani, for his middle-school science project, measured four different fonts - Times New Roman, Garamond, Comic Sans, and Century Gothic - and found that Garamond's thin, light strokes resulted in a font that required 24 per cent less ink.

He reasoned that as printer ink is twice as expensive as Chanel No. 5, the govt. could save as much as 467 million dollars per year if both federal and state agencies got on board.

Fonts are usually measured by points, with one point equaling 1/72nd of an inch, so it seems that a 12-point font may be 1/6th of an inch tall, when printed. However, there is no guarantee that when you print out a font at 12-points that the letters would be 12-points tall. Only the line that the letters is going to be printed on will be 12-points tall.

The 12-point measurement actually refers to the flat metal part of the type which never comes in contact with the ink.

What makes a 12-point font a 12-point font has nothing do with ink infact its invisible on the page, meaning that, depending on how a typeface is designed, some fonts at 12 points will be physically smaller, which is the trap that Mirchandani fell into.

In fact, Garamond's letters are 15 per cent smaller than the average of the fonts that Mirchandani took into account.