Government Could Switch to Garamond Font To Save $136 Million a Year

A 14-year-old student has found one weird trick to save the government $136 million per year--really.

Suvir Mirchandani of Pittsburg, Pa., was working to find ways to help his school cut costs when he noticed the varying fonts teachers used on handouts, Yahoo News reported.

A sixth-grader at Dorseyville Middle School, Suvir started thinking about how much ink was used and looked for ways to cut back, especially when it came to the most commonly used letters (e, t, a, o and r), CNN reported.

After all, "Ink is two times more expensive than French perfume by volume," Suvir told CNN.

An ounce of Chanel No. 5 perfume can be obtained for $38, but Hewlett-Packard printer ink can cost up to $75 for the same amount.

Suvir figured out that Garamond would use the least amount of ink, saving his school an impressive $21,000 a year. The sixth-grader then looked to share his findings, reaching out to the Journal for Emerging Investigators.

A forum for middle school and high school students, the Journal for Emerging Investigators was founded by Harvard graduate students in 2011 and has standards equal to those of academic journals.

"We were so impressed," founder Sarah Fankhauser said of Suvir's project. "We could really see the real-world application in Suvir's paper."

The journal's founders challenged Suvir to apply his discoveries to the United States government. When he applied the same principles to the General Services Administration's $467 million estimated annual cost of ink, he found the federal government could cut costs by around $136 annually if only Garamond was used.

So will Uncle Sam be making the switch?

Gary Somerset, media and public relations manager at the Government Printing Office, was impressed by Survir's findings but didn't say if the government would make the switch to Garamond or not.

The printing office is focusing on making content available online, which has substantially cut back on the amount of paper and ink used, he told CNN.

"In 1994, we were producing 20,000 copies a day of both the Federal Register and Congressional Record. Twenty years later, we produce roughly 2,500 print copies a day," he said.