🚀 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 format 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 format is "publication title."
In both cases, FM seems to think that the characters have only a single
character format (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 formats interact to determine the
appearance of the text to be preserved.

I know I can create combination formats (e.g., "publication title link
color"), but this leads to an unnecessary proliferation of character
formats, 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