Hello again,

Sorry for not having written before. I'm afraid the macro, as proposed, doesn't work. After running it, every punctuation sign has been changed and set to italics, not just the ones following a word in italics, which is what I wanted.

(Of course it could be my fault; I'm rather new to all this. It took a few tries, too--I have a long document full of images and tables and what not, rather unwieldy, that needs to be saved as a Word 2003 doc; the program couldn't cope with the macro and would stall, so I had to try with a single separated chapter. Also, I've thought it better: I'd suppress !, ? and ) from the macro, because of double signs; my text is in Spanish.)

I will add a bit from The Chicago Manual of Style (15th ed.) to explain what I'm after:

"6.3. […] All punctuation marks should appear in the same font--roman or italic--as the main or surrounding text, except for punctuation that belongs to a title or an exclamation in a different font. This departure from Chicago's former usage…[=]
6.5. Punctuation and font: alternative system. According to a more traditional system, periods, commas, colons, and semicolons should appear in the same font as the word, letter, character, or symbol immediately preceding them if different from the main or surrounding text. […]"

This last option is what I want to do: traditional typographic usage.

Thank you again for your very kind help.