Trouble is for a large organisation the requirements cover a lot of ground. Stats Can had a very serious look at doing this but some of the impediments were lack of support for handicapped computer users, no equivalent of Visual Basic, it doesn't sound important but there is a lot of time invested in developing applications in Visual Basic applications copying data from computer systems down or reformatting spreadsheets etc etc. One problem is that much of this work was done by people who have retired, summer students, or just moved on and the work hasn't been well documented so its a mine field to even try to convert, especially the once a year, or even once every ten years and I've seen one or two of those.
The other really big problem is typefaces and that one is a killer. If you have many people working on a document presentation is extremely important. Each typeface has different widths for each letter, different available character sets accented ones are fun, different kerning which basically adds up to a three hundred page document with foot notes etc will page break differently in different fonts and if you have multiple people working on or updating a document that's a no no.
Step one for this has to be that organisations standarise on a non-proprietary font, ideally an ISO standard if there is one.
Cheerio John
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