There are a lot of companies that use Microsoft Word as their primary development tool for documentation because it’s ubiquitous and everyone knows how to use it -basically. That means more people have the ability to edit documents, not just the writers. That’s good and bad. With that convenience comes a number of problems that writers who are used to working with Adobe Framemaker know all too well; Word doesn’t always do what you want it to do. And sometimes Word does things that you don’t want it to do for no obvious reason and there is no obvious fix other than shouting at the screen in frustration, “WHY?”
One day I woke up and had a problem that I never had before. When saving my Word doc as a PDF using ‘Save As > PDF or XPS’, all of my headings (heading 1, heading 2, heading 3, etc.) would display as italic in my PDF file. Funny, all my headings were non-italic in my source file, just the way I wanted it. “WHY?” It was fine yesterday and all the months previous. What changed between the time I shut off the computer last night and started it back up this morning?
After a few weeks on the boards and trying to find a solution, I finally solved the problem of headings displaying in italics in the PDFs generated from Word 2007.
Microsoft includes an update to the Arial Black font (v2.40) with SP3. This new font is the root of this particular problem. The fix is to delete the new font and replace it with the old font, which is saved in an uninstall backup file.
This doesn’t seem to affect everybody using SP3, which explains the lack of knowledge in the forums that should be talking about this., and it certainly didn’t affect me for months. It just started happening without, apparently, any rhyme or reason.
So now you know the fix.
