Save the Life of a Tree with Formatting Hijinks

To prepare for reading the behemoth that I’ve birthed, I decided I needed the entire thing printed out. I thus compiled the document, opened it in Word and proceeded to stare at the result in shock.

That’s right. Four hundred and forty-six pages. I’m pretty sure if I try sending a document of that size to my HP Photosmart C3100 series inkjet, the print cartridges would spontaneously dry and shrivel in terror. I went to the Staples site to look at the cost of printing four hundred and forty-six pages. At eight cents per page, the total came to a little over thirty-five dollars. Not bad, but that’s still a lotta paper.

Back in grad school, I made friends with a font named Garamond. Garamond was my guy. Garamond could help me squeeze an extra couple hundred words into a ten-page paper and get around those irritating submission maximums. So I selected the whole document and applied my buddy Garamond. That’s better. Next, I applied Microsoft’s Narrow margin setting. Why not? No longer do I have to worry about fastidious professors measuring my margins!

Ah. Now that’s much better.

With some a few additional tinkering with line spacing and deleting automatic page breaks, I managed to get the total pages down to three hundred and thirty-eight, or for you accounting-type folk, a savings of a hundred and eight pages. My format machinations more than paid for the five dollar rush fee. I encourage you to make friends with Garamond. He’s the guy to call when you need a little help in squeezing in that last brilliant paragraph.

Now I’m realizing that I may need a real, adultish printer. Something that will laugh in the face of my verbosity when I hit Print. Something with a laser focus that can dash off pages in color or deliver crisp lines of black and white lines of text with nary a grunt or smear. So my fellow scribblers, what do you use?