If I had read your post more carefully, I would have seen Callout, not Column.
What version are you using? I just tried this in ACA 2010 with the Detail Mark A1 callout, placing callouts only, and it is working the way you want it to: if the Attribute text style property of the tool is set to Target, then the font of the current text style is used for the attribute(s) in the callout. If I set it to Content, then the font defined in the Content file (RomanS) is used.
I do recall playing with this in a much earlier version (back when all callouts were AEC Content, so things may have changed since then), and when using content that was set to have attributes use the target drawing's current text style for the font, on the initial importation of the block definition, that font was written into the block definition. If the content file was later changed to use the source file, you still got that original font, because the block already existed in the drawing so it was not being imported into the file on subsequent uses. (I think if the current text style was changed to one using a different font after the first use, with the content file set to use the Target font, then the font for that instance of the attribute would be overridden.)
All of the content that I had a hand in setting up for my office was set up to use the Content font, both to avoid having random fonts used and because I was not comfortable with the possibility of having someone use ATTSYNC to reset any overridden fonts back to the original block definition font.
I just checked the behavior in 2008, and it works fine there, too. 2008 also has callout tools, not AEC Content. I do not recall which release first introduced callout tools for the tool palettes, it may have been 2006 or 2007.
So, maybe not much help in solving your problem, unless you are using a fairly old release.
David Koch
AutoCAD Architecture and Revit User
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