How a typeface changes a printing bill
A printed letter is a tiny patch of toner or ink. Across millions of pages, the area covered by those patches adds up—so a font’s design can affect how quickly a printer’s supplies run out.
Garamond’s letterforms generally use thinner strokes than Times New Roman’s, leaving less dark area on the page. Its characters are also relatively compact. At the same nominal point size, that can mean both less ink per line and, when the text reflows, more words fitting on a page. Fewer printed pages can reduce paper use as well as printing costs.
Why the estimate depends on the documents
The projected savings came from applying those small differences to a very large volume of government printing. It is an estimate, not a fixed discount built into every page: the result changes with how much text is printed, the documents’ layouts, printer settings, and whether switching fonts changes page counts.
There is also a practical tradeoff. A compact font may fit more text, but if readers find it less comfortable—or an official document’s layout is fixed—the theoretical reduction may not translate into useful savings. For a long report that can be freely reformatted, however, modest reductions per page can accumulate across print runs.
The striking point is that a font choice is not merely decorative at institutional scale: a small change in the dark area of each letter can become a substantial change in the supplies consumed across millions of pages.
