Font is not changed in Word docx generated by pandoc using --reference-doc

Question

I have tried a number of ways to change the font in the word docx generated by pandoc. The following is the latest:

1. Update the custom-reference.docx to use size-10 font for everything but the Title and Header fields

2. pandoc --reference-doc=custom-reference.docx -o docs/reader_filtering.docx docs/reader_filtering.md

The output font of the output file is still Cambria with font size=12 (except for the Title and Headers). I am pretty desperate to get this fixed because the client insists on using Word.

Update Changing the font in the custom-reference.docx does not work. It is necessary to bring up the Style dialog for a given paragraph and change the font manually by hitting "Modify" and then entering the font. You have to do this one by one for every style:

This is tedious and nonsensical.

Answer 1

I dug a bit and found the python library python-docx. The specific Styles that pandoc creates mostly end with Tok so the following code is doing a good job:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

infile="$1"
infile_noext=$(echo "${infile}"  | cut -f 1 -d '.')
outfile="${infile_noext}.docx"
# pandoc --print-default-data-file reference.docx > custom-reference.docx
# pandoc --reference-doc=custom-reference.docx   -o ${infile_noext}.docx ${infile}
pandoc  -o ${outfile} ${infile}

# Do this once: "pip3 install -y python-docx"

python <<EOF -
import docx
from docx.shared import Pt
import sys
# d = docx.Document(sys.argv[1])
d = docx.Document('${outfile}')
# for style in list(filter(lambda x: x.name.endswith('Tok'), d.styles)):
for style in list(filter(lambda x: not x.name.startswith('Heading'), d.styles)):
    #['CommentTok','NormalTok','Source Code', 'AttributeTok']
    # style = document.styles['Normal']
    font = style.font
    font.size = Pt(10)
d.save('${outfile}')
EOF
echo "Created ${outfile}"

Then