When they pay the bills, it is often a challenge to "require" that. Now, if they didn't then we may not eat the cost of fixing it, but thats another story.
Why is it a challenge to to get the files you need to execute the work?? If you don't ask for all the right data, you need to eat the cost for fixing it. As soon as you get a template or a spec that says use style "whatever", the very next question should be "What's the font for that style?" Depending on FONTALT to cover it is a "cad monkey" error.
You assume we don't ask?
If you did, you'd have the right font and there'd be no issue.
Remember, in our case, most of the people are outsourcing not just because they are busy, but also they sometimes do not have the knowledge to make their in-house engineering dept work to any kind of a standard and they work very inefficiantly. If they had things well in hand they probably wouldn't need us to do work for them (if they have drafters on staff anyway, a few don't have cad at all). Most don't know what a standard is (at least until they have worked with us for a while).
You keep talking about "them" and "they", what "they" do matters not at all.
We VERY frequently end up doing more then just outsourcing, we end up helping the client set up a cad standard for themselves and help them document them so those issues don't crop up again.
Then re-fonting style Standard is NO issue.
I have trained more then one cad manager from one of our clients engineering departments after they have worked with us for a few years and we show them the time and money they are spending due to not having things documented or standardized.
One thing I tell them is to leave anything that comes with Autocad as "standard", like dimstyle and textstyle alone
Why?? Its a non-issue.
Yeah, you *CAN* modify them to no detriment, but it does increase the chance of something going wrong, so it makes sense not to do it and avoid the issue alltogether.
if you've trained them as you say you have, re-fonting style standard will not be an issue and CANNOT increase the chance of something being wrong. What WILL increase that chance for erro is assuming that ANYone leaves them alone.