Maintain italics on imported text, within Paragraph Style

[TroutBug]

Hi! I recently began using Publisher to lay-out a book. I have imported/placed text from a Word document that was edited to have italics on certain words, and the italics are shown in Publisher before applying a Text Style (in the original Times New Roman it was edited in). But when I edit an applied Text Style that has Font Traits as [No Change] (which I believe should mean it does not change the bolds and italics), it doesn't stick after I click OK. It reverts back to Regular every time. I would like to maintain the italics throughout the text of the book as they were originally edited. Am I doing something wrong? Is there a better way to do this? Thanks in advance!

[R C-R]

As installed on your computer, does the font family URWBononiT include an italic typeface? If not, Affinity will not fake one by skewing characters, nor I think will it let you choose that trait in the text style panel.

[TroutBug]

Thanks for the reply. Yes it does; it has regular, italic, bold, and bold italic. I can manually italicize URWBononiT. See below, the highlighted text is italicized.

[walt.farrell]

3 hours ago, TroutBug said:

But when I edit an applied Text Style that has Font Traits as [No Change] (which I believe should mean it does not change the bolds and italics), it doesn't stick after I click OK. It reverts back to Regular every time.

I cannot explain why it reverts to Regular for you.

However, I believe you have misunderstood "No Change". That is used when you have style B based on style A, and in style B you do not want to change some characteristic that B inherits from A.

Whether italics and bold in an existing paragraph are changed to regular text when you apply a text style to the paragraph may really depend on how you applied the italics and bold, and then how you apply the paragraph text style. I haven't experimented with it enough to claim I understand it, but you could apply italic and bold by:

• applying a Character text style to the characters; or
• pressing the I or B buttons on the Context Toolbar.

Those two methods operate differently,  I believe, but I need to do more experiments.

Then, to apply the paragraph text style you have several methods. One is to select the paragraphs and specify the paragraph text style on the Context Toolbar. That will probably lose the italic and bold characteristics. But for an alternative suggestion, after selecting the paragraph(s), go to the Text Styles studio panel, right-click on your text style and choose one of:

• Apply "your-style-name" to Paragraphs and Preserve Character Formatting
  or
• Apply "your-style-name" to Paragraphs and Preserve Local Formatting

The first one may be appropriate if you've applied character text styles to get the italic and bold; the second, if you've used the I and B buttons.

[Old Bruce]

What I do is place the file then go through the Find and Replace 'Format' and choose Italic to find all the italic text and replace it with the homemade Character Style "Italic" then do the same for all the bold text replacing it with the "Bold" Character Style. These Character Styles are based on No Style and have only Bold and Italic for changes, do not change the font family.

Now I can change the Paragraph styles and have the bold or italic text remain bold or italic while inheriting the font family, size etc.

Obviously if you have a bunch of Bold Italic text make a Character Style for "Bold Italic"

[TroutBug]

Okay, thanks to walt.ferrell and Old Bruce for taking the time to reply and for clarifying my understandings of Publisher. The best solution for me, I think, is to do exactly what Old Bruce said. I think it's a little annoying and cumbersome to have to go through these steps, but it does work. I worked in InDesign for many years and it, as a rule, would maintain bolds and italics automatically when a new paragraph style was applied to text, which was much easier and frankly, better, IMO. But thanks to all for the help!