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I have been using Mellel for 10+ years and never had this problem until the last few months (I was in the hospital and couldn't do much for two months).

Anyway, I had consistently used Mellel on desktop and laptop, with F1 as Normal, F2 for Bold, F3 for Italic. For the past several months, the F3 does not produce any change in the font. I tried assigning that shortcut in System Preferences > Keyboard shortcuts. Doesn't work.

Then I thought maybe the keyboard was going bad. I used another keyboard from a backup computer, and still no change. The F3 key does not make any change in the font.

Can you help me resolve this? I have several F-keys assigned for special shortcuts that I often use in Mellel.

Hello Rich,

I guess you are using a font that has no italic. An example for such a font is Lucida Grade.

Unlike Nisus, which activates or produces a "fake" italic by such fonts, Mellel doesn't do this.

Change the font to Times (or any other font with genuine italic) and see if that solves the problem.

Thanks. That did not help, I tried 8-10 other fonts. However, I then began looking at the character set dialog. And the Bold and Italic Style Variations were not set. So I changed the variant "Italic" to be Italic and "bold" to be "bold" using Gentium Book Basic. Now everything works as expected. Thanks for giving me a hint on looking for clues. Interestingly, I have used Mellel for 10+ years and never had this problem with Style Variations.

Mellel comes with predefined character style variations but they can be redefined by the user one character style at a time, a power that can come in handy when working with unusual fonts and font combinations. You may have inadvertently redefined the C or F3 character style variation in some of your character styles so the variation ended up providing the plain roman instead of the italic. This can happen if macros that might be active while using Mellel use triggers that involve FKeys. If this recurs you should be able to fix the problem this way.

Styles > Edit Style Sets.
Select the Style Set you want to fix.
Select the Character pane in the Edit Style Set box.
Double click the first Character Style you want to fix, e.g. Regular.
In the Character Style: Regular window that opens, set the style variation to C and the Main font Face to Italic
Hit Save. This fixes the problem for the Regular Character Style
Move on down to the next Character Style in the list, until you’ve fixed the whole Style Set.

Curiously I’ve found cases where it looks from the dialogue as if the bold and italic aren’t properly set up for a given character style, when they actually are. This seems to be a display bug that crept in recently.