🚀 go-pugleaf

[Apologies if this appears more than once.  My newsreader is acting weird.]

I have a character format named "publication title" that keeps everything the
same, except it applies italics.  I have another character format, "link color,"
that keeps everything the same, except it colors the text.  It often makes sense
to apply both, because many publication titles are links to an underlying URL.

If I apply "publication title" and then "link color" to some text, I get the
visual effect I want (italicized and colored text), but the status bar says that
the character type is "link color," as does the corresponding MIF.  If I apply
these formats in the other order ("link color" first and "publication" title
second), the result looks the same, but both the status bar and the MIF indicate
that the character type is "publication title." In both cases, FM seems to think
that the characters have only a single character tag (the last one applied), but
because I'm using FM to single-source for documents that may later be translated
into e.g. XML, I want the fact that two character styles interact to determine
the appearance of the text to be preserved.

I know I can create combination styles (e.g., "publication title link color"),
but this leads to an unnecessary proliferation of character styles, plus it just
reeks of hack.  Is there a better way to approach the problem of applying
multiple independent and complementary character formats to text and having FM
preserve that information?

I'm using FM6 on WinXP.

Thanks,

Scott