17.8.3.1 altName

This element specifies a set of alternative names which can be used to locate the font specified by the parent element. This set of alternative names is stored in a comma-delimited list, with all adjacent commas ignored (i.e. a value of Name A, Name B is equivalent to Name A,,,,,,,,, Name B).

When an application cannot locate a font using the primary name stored on the font attribute of the font element (17.8.3.10), it should use each alternate name in term to attempt to locate the font, and use the first font for which is locates a match.

Font names stored using this element shall be specified in the encoding specified by the Fonts part in its XML declaration; the name of the font will be interpreted by the XML parser. [Note: UTF-8 is not supported for font names within OpenType fonts, and is not always supported for file names in file systems. For example, older Japanese versions of Microsoft Windows use Windows-31J for filenames. To use extant font names in the values of this attribute, they should be converted to the character encoding appropriate for this standard and copying raw byte sequences from font files should be avoided. end note]

If this element is omitted, then no alternate names are present for the parent font.

[Example: Consider the following information stored for a single font:

<w:font w:name="SimSun">
  <w:altName w:val="Arial Unicode MS" />
  …
</w:font>

The altName element specifies that when no font with a name of SimSun (the primary font name) can be located, that applications should attempt to locate a font with the name Arial Unicode MS before doing substitution based on the font metrics. end example]

Attributes

val (String Value)

Specifies that its contents contain a string.

The contents of this string are interpreted based on the context of the parent XML element.

[Example: Consider the following WordprocessingML fragment:

  <w:pPr>
    <w:pStyle w:val="Heading1" />
  </w:pPr>

The value of the val attribute is the ID of the associated paragraph style’s styleId.

However, consider the following fragment:

  <w:sdtPr>
    <w:alias w:val="SDT Title Example" />
    …
  </w:sdtPr>

In this case, the decimal number in the val attribute is the caption of the nearest

ancestor structured document tag. In each case, the value is interpreted in the context of the parent element. end example]

The possible values for this attribute are defined by the ST_String simple type (22.9.2.13).

[Note: The W3C XML Schema definition of this element’s content model (CT_String) is located in A.1. end note]