4 ms·

No one in government is going to stop printing documents any time soon. Abandoning printing might be the most efficient solution but it's also the most disrupti

by ollysb 13y ago

No one in government is going to stop printing documents any time soon. Abandoning printing might be the most efficient solution but it's also the most disruptive solution. His solution is elegant in that it would receive little in the way of friction whilst providing tangible benefits.

tarblog 13y ago
It's not completely trivial to change what font the government uses. There are a lot of documents that would need to be layed out differently after the change.
- derefr 13y ago
  > There are a lot of documents that would need to be layed out differently after the change. 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.
- baddox 13y ago
  I actually think it would be a lot easier to eliminate printing on a document by document basis than changing the font and dealing with all potential issues arising from that.
tudorw 13y ago
I agree, on a global scale this could have real impact, especially if the headline grabbing aspect can encourage people to look at other ways to save ink and paper usage in general. I understand that there is a financial impact in laying out new forms, the future savings on ink costs could go towards a usability and accessibility audit and use the findings to inform the new layout designs :)
- chrissnell 13y ago
  > there is a financial impact in laying out new forms 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. [1] http://www.apd.army.mil/ProductMap.asp http://www.apd.army.mil/ProductMap.asp
  - toddrew 13y ago
    I use to work as a comsec custodian. It was my job to update or replace military publications with the newest version. 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.

by ollysb 13y ago

tarblog 13y ago

It's not completely trivial to change what font the government uses. There are a lot of documents that would need to be layed out differently after the change.

derefr 13y ago
> There are a lot of documents that would need to be layed out differently after the change. 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.
baddox 13y ago
I actually think it would be a lot easier to eliminate printing on a document by document basis than changing the font and dealing with all potential issues arising from that.

tudorw 13y ago

I agree, on a global scale this could have real impact, especially if the headline grabbing aspect can encourage people to look at other ways to save ink and paper usage in general. I understand that there is a financial impact in laying out new forms, the future savings on ink costs could go towards a usability and accessibility audit and use the findings to inform the new layout designs :)

chrissnell 13y ago
> there is a financial impact in laying out new forms 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. [1] http://www.apd.army.mil/ProductMap.asp http://www.apd.army.mil/ProductMap.asp
- toddrew 13y ago
  I use to work as a comsec custodian. It was my job to update or replace military publications with the newest version. 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.