Font substitution - umlauts subbed ok?

["Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

Paul Newbold reports: <<I'm having some english framemaker 6 files
translated into german but our translators don't have our font on their PC
(Rotis) - and they don't want to buy them (and we don't want to buy them for
them either as they're circa $150!).  If they send me translated files in,
say, font=Ariel and I impose Rotis on the doc when I get it back, does
anyone know if umlauts and the like in Ariel will be substituted with Rotis
umlauts and other german characters?>>

I'd be willing to bet that if the accented characters use the standard
Windows character set, they will translate between most standard Windows
fonts with no errors. You should test this, though, and it's trivially easy
to do: create a file containing all the standard accented characters you'll
use, send them to your translator, then bring back the text they return to
you and see whether any accents changed. (This is most likely to happen if
you're working on different computer platforms from your contractor.) Even
if the test appears successful, saving $150 on fonts is a false economy: the
time you'll take verifying that no accents are lost is going to cost you far
more than this, and if the translation doesn't work perfectly, the errors
will cost you even more to find and fix. Any reasonably big translation firm
should be willing to purchase the font as part of the cost of working with
you as a client, but if they won't, suck it up and spend the money yourself.
It's such a small amount that it won't even show up as a ripple in the
balance sheet for a moderately large translation project.

--Geoff Hart, FERIC, Pointe-Claire, Quebec
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
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