A 14-year-old kid has worked out a way that the US government could save $400 million a year, just by changing the typeface it uses. Suvir Mirchandani found that all that cash could be saved if his school district and government agencies, switched to Garamond. When he compared the price of ink, which is more than a bottle of perfume, and the number of documents printed each year.

To find a way to cut costs and ink usage, he collected samples of his school's handouts and looked at the most commonly used letters - e, t, a, o and r. He then measured how much ink those letters used in four popular typefaces, by using APFill Ink Coverage Software. He printed out large sample letters in the fonts and weighed them, before concluding that Garamond, with its more slender typeface, was the most cost-effective.

The teenager calculated that if his school district switched to the typeface it could save $21,000 a year but if extended across the entire government it could save millions. That is the sort of cash that the US government could put towards bailing out banks, giving tax free status to corporations, churches and invading other countries.