Getting the default font for a document

[JordanReiter]

Currently, in most cases if you attempt to determine the default font for a document, that is:

documents.styles['Normal'].font.name

Very often the returned value will be blank — even though the normal style will definitely have a font specified when the file is opened, and it is located here:

file.docx/styles.xml

<w:styles ...>
  <w:docDefaults>
    <w:rPrDefault>
      <w:rPr>
        <w:rFonts w:ascii="Times New Roman" w:eastAsia="Times New Roman" w:hAnsi="Times New Roman" w:cs="Times New Roman"/>
        <w:lang w:val="en-US" w:eastAsia="en-US" w:bidi="ar-SA"/>
       </w:rPr>
    </w:rPrDefault>
  </w:docDefaults>

In the same way that there are special attributes for getting and setting the various margins of a Section, it seems that it should be possible to add getters and setters to the Document object for the default font properties.

Not having a very comprehensive understanding of the underworkings of xmlalchemy I am uncertain what steps I would take to enable this feature. I would be happy to write up the functionality if you point me in the right direction.
`

[scanny]

Well, there are two approaches, one is pursuing a commit/merge and the other is just getting it working for your use case. There is a lot more due diligence and work involved in the former.

But the gist of making it work is gaining access to the w:docDefaults element so you can modify it. Without modifying the existing python-docx code you can do something like this:

styles_element = document.styles.element
# lxml calls to get or add w:rPrDefault element, note it must appear
# in the proper sequence, maybe something like this if you happen
# to know it's already there:
rPrDefault = styles_element.xpath('w:docDefaults/w:rPrDefault')[0]
default_font = Font(rPrDefault)

Then all the members of Font would be available for manipulating typeface, size, etc.

If you wanted to modify python-docx code, you'd do that in docx.oxml.styles in the CT_Styles class, adding a ZeroOrOne() item to add a set of properties and methods (automatically via the metaclass) to the CT_Styles custom element class, which is what a w:styles element is constructed as. Then there would be adding a CT_DocDefaults oxml class, probably in the same module, registering it in docx.oxml.init and giving it the rPrDefault child (which is probably already defined somewhere).

If you wanted to attempt contributing a merge, you'd start by updating the appropriate analysis/enhancement-proposal page to reflect the proposed API changes, like adding Styles.document_default_font or whatever. It would be the page I linked to above or one next to it. Once that's agreed and merged you'd do the acceptance tests and then implement step by step with unit tests. More on that later if you're interested. This PR by DKWoods gives an idea what's involved and what the series of commits looks like: https://github.com/python-openxml/python-docx/pull/261/commits

[JordanReiter]

Thanks for the thorough response! I'll see if I can carve some time out to try an implementation.

[320834]

Hi, I was wondering if there is code change in progress for this functionality or has it already been merged in?