GeneralVeers

And, yeah, this works for me, too... Wild! Thank you, @walt.farrell! This is EXACTLY what I needed!

Huh! Interesting idea! Thanks!

Thanks again, @Hangman. Your explanations are cogent and comprehensive, but unfortunately, it's just not worthwhile for me to go through a five hundred page manuscript and click on every instance of italics. It'll be easier to forgo stylesheets and just select whole chunks of text and format them. I'm a little baffled by the whole thing because I've never had this problem with, say, InDesign. It's really weird to me that it works this way (not sure why you'd want this as the default and have NO way at all to get around it), but there's nothing to be done for it. Thanks once more for your help.

Ok, wow, that’s very comprehensive and helpful. Sadly, though, it looks like I will have to manually go through the manuscript. Apparently, if you just click the I button in Pages (or Scrivener) or type Command-I, that applies Italics, but I guess somehow not at the character level? So each time I work on a manuscript, I have to manually open the Character Styles menu and choose Italics as opposed to just…typing Command-I. In the example below, the first circled word was made italic by going into the Formatting menu and selecting Italics. The second circled word was made italic by typing Command-I. The first one had its formatting persist; the second one did not. Very frustrating. It adds a lot of friction to have to go into a menu as opposed to just typing a keyboard shortcut. I’ve never seen this behavior in an app before. I truly appreciate your patience and attention to detail. Thank you so much!

@Hangman, thanks so much! This makes sense. However, how do I adapt this for a manuscript in .doc or .rtf form that comes from, say, Word or Scrivener or Pages? Do I have to go through those documents and manually do something to every single instance of italics???

I must be some kind of idiot. I’m sure this can be done, but none of the obvious ways work… I have the Body style defined as Font A, with Font Traits set to [No Change]. So it seems to me that if I have some text set in Font B, italic, with No Style that if I tap on Body, that text should change to Font A, but maintain the italics…right? Instead, it switches to Font A and loses the italics. If I have a manuscript that already has things like bold and italics in it, but need to change the style sheet in order to change, say, font, leading, size, indent, etc., but without effecting bolds and italics, how the heck do I do that??? It truly seems like what I’ve described above is the way to do it, but again…I must be some kind of idiot.