Hello, We recently ran into a problem with Word having to do with the fonts that ditac and xfc were using to generate .docx files. Our issue is that when we ask Word to save the .docx file as PDF, how it treats the fonts depends on which fonts are installed on the users system. It seems that ditac's conversion from .xml (DITA) files to .fo files uses font family "serif" and "sans-serif" and that the FO->docx converter changes those to Times and Helvetica. For why this is an issue, see the P.S.
According to http://www.xmlmind.com/ditac/_distrib/doc/manual/xsltParams.html we can change the base-font-size but we cannot control what fonts are being used in the final docx file. I was able to work around our problem by changing the FO xsl files so that every mention of serif became TimesNewRoman and every mention of sans-serif became Arial, but that just feels wrong; With a 100 page document I haven't yet gone over it closely to make sure nothing else was affected and I don't really understand the implications of that change. We'd like to have options, similar to base-font-size, that would let us control the fonts used. Or maybe we've overlooked an option that does that? Thanks, -Doug P.S. Why this matters to us: We are using Word to generate PDF files, and how Word does that depends on what fonts it has available. On most of our Windows systems, there is no Times font installed, so the registry font substitution is used to translate Times to Times New Roman. On those systems, the PDF is generated correctly. On my system, I have a printer driver installed which has a Times PostScript font. This means Word will not use the registry font substitution and instead will generate a PDF full of images of the text (which are not searchable in Acrobat Reader). We are using Word to generate PDF only because we want to be able to take two different versions of our DITA documents, as .docx files and use Word to generate a merged "what changed" document. (Our downstream users do not want to see raw DITA diffs.) We feel asking for control over the fonts used would be reasonable even if we weren't having issues generating PDF, but this has become a critical issue for us. Right now we can have someone with a "safe" system do this, but that isn't sustainable...
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