Thanks Aaron; actually i’m a little relieved i wasn’t overlooking a simple solution. : >

i played around with it along the lines you suggested and think this will work better than what i was doing – find all text within quotation marks – including the marks – and IF the text is italic then just change all to italic, which will change the marks too. kind of slow and a lot of tapping but it will work. here’s the expression i used, below. thanks for your help. -jamie

(“|‘).+?(”|’)