When I copy and paste formatting, does it erase my italics formatting too?
I wish it wouldn’t, since I might want to make the text the same size and font, but the italics stay the same. Does that make sense? I don’t think it does that.
It doesn’t seem to copy and paste indents though, I might like that.
Maybe (another) preference for what we want text formatting to include?
Thanks for all your help.
Yes, that is because things like italics are actually a part of the font description, which you are pasting. Same reason if you reset your font to Lucida Grande, which doesn’t feature any italics by default, you’ll lose italics. That’s just the way the OS X text engine works.
Depending on what you are doing, you might do better by ignoring formatting inconsistencies for now, and then normalise everything after you’ve finished pasting in new material, with Documents/Convert/Formatting to Default Text Style. This has more options, and by default it will attempt to respect inline formatting like italics, among many other things.
If that isn’t a viable solution, you might try looking into Presets, which let you handle things with more detail in what does or does not apply. Overly aggressive presets will still wipe out inline formatting though—because again, italics are merely a part of the font itself.
Ruler attributes are attached to the paragraph, not the text within the paragraph, if that makes sense. You need to use a different command to paste ruler styles. You’ll find that in the Format/Text/ sub-menu.
Again, presets can combine ruler and character style application in one move, if set up right.