Imagine that you have a metal block for a 12-point letter "l." When you dip this block in ink for printing, the raised "l" will end up rubbing off on a piece of paper, but depending on how that "l" was designed, it is unlikely that it will actually be 1/6th of an inch tall. The 12-point measurement instead refers to the size of the type body—the flat metal part of the type that never touches ink.
What makes a 12-point font a 12-point font, then, has nothing do with ink. It's invisible on the page. This means that, depending on how a typeface is designed, some fonts at 12 points will be physically smaller (and therefore less readable than others at the same size. You could, in theory, have a 12-point font with letters that were almost invisible to the naked eye, but that wouldn't make it a more efficient font when it comes to ink savings or readability.
This is the major trap Mirchandani fell into. Garamond's letters are significantly smaller at the same font size than those of Times New Roman, Comic Sans, and Century Gothic. As Phinney notes, in fact, Garamond is about 15% smaller than the average of the fonts that our plucky 14-year-old compared it to, which translates into a 28% savings in surface area—pretty close to Mirchandani's alleged 24% savings in ink.
What this all means is that if you printed any of the other fonts to match Garamond's actual size, you'd get almost the same savings in ink cost, at the same expense of readability. Garamond doesn't really use less ink than Times New Roman, Comic Sans, or Century Gothic: it's just the equivalent of a 10-point font rendered on a 12-point line. And sure enough, if you look at Mirchandani's sample text, Garamond looks like it has been rendered at a much smaller point size than the other fonts; it's obviously harder to read.
Imagine that you have a metal block for a 12-point letter "l." When you dip this block in ink for printing, the raised "l" will end up rubbing off on a piece of paper, but depending on how that "l" was designed, it is unlikely that it will actually be 1/6th of an inch tall. The 12-point measurement instead refers to the size of the type body—the flat metal part of the type that never touches ink.
What makes a 12-point font a 12-point font, then, has nothing do with ink. It's invisible on the page. This means that, depending on how a typeface is designed, some fonts at 12 points will be physically smaller (and therefore less readable than others at the same size. You could, in theory, have a 12-point font with letters that were almost invisible to the naked eye, but that wouldn't make it a more efficient font when it comes to ink savings or readability.
This is the major trap Mirchandani fell into. Garamond's letters are significantly smaller at the same font size than those of Times New Roman, Comic Sans, and Century Gothic. As Phinney notes, in fact, Garamond is about 15% smaller than the average of the fonts that our plucky 14-year-old compared it to, which translates into a 28% savings in surface area—pretty close to Mirchandani's alleged 24% savings in ink.
What this all means is that if you printed any of the other fonts to match Garamond's actual size, you'd get almost the same savings in ink cost, at the same expense of readability. Garamond doesn't really use less ink than Times New Roman, Comic Sans, or Century Gothic: it's just the equivalent of a 10-point font rendered on a 12-point line. And sure enough, if you look at Mirchandani's sample text, Garamond looks like it has been rendered at a much smaller point size than the other fonts; it's obviously harder to read.
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