Making multi-lingual publications look easy (when, in fact, they're not).

With decades of experience under our belts we have tackled most of the difficult jobs, including producing multi-lingual publications. "How hard can they be?" you might ask. Well, the answer is they can be very tricky indeed.

There are many pitfalls awaiting the inexperienced. Unusual and hard to find foreign font sets may be required, ligatures and accents that display perfectly on screen but will not print out, copy that runs 25% longer in one language than in another, weird kerning, missing character sets that appear in Word but do not display in Quark or Indesign, true type clashing with open type, mixed manufacturers fonts causing your font utility software to freeze and so on.

And wait to you start working with Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese or Thai. All the normal rules go out the window. The text reads right to left and the publication starts at the back. We know this because we've been there and lived to tell the tale.

In our time we have designed and artworked publications in German, Italian, Spanish, French, Polish, Latvian, Croatian, Arabic, Thai, Greek, Norwegian, Hebrew and Russian.

In fact, we've got pretty good at this multi-lingual stuff which means clients keep giving it to us. Currently we are producing for AgustaWestland a regular bi-monthly Anglo-Italian internal comms magazine. AgustaWestland have recently purchased a factory in Poland so we have now begun to produce graphics and posters in Polish as well.

We were recently contacted to produce a series of training manuals for Teknique, the training-arm of SpinVox, the global telecommunications company. These documents were over 100 pages each and required in popular languages such as German, French and Spanish. All needed to be artworked to the same exacting standards.

This led to use being entrusted to design and produce a high-level special report in Serbian and English.

The key to delivering a multi-lingual product without the tears is attention to detail, rigorous cross-checking and experience in dealing with foreign language font sets and how they display in different font utilities. Having a good foreign language font library also helps (at Ouno we've got more than our fair share of obscure Eastern European font sets).

So, if you need a foreign language publication professionally produced without causing a diplomatic incident in the process, talk to Ouno.