How can I stop Pages from bolding/italicizing ordered list item numbers/letters?

I'm writing a long, technical document that uses a lot of ordered lists in Pages '09. Often when I bold or italicize the first bit of text I type for a list item it Pages applies the same styling to the letter or number of that list item. It's been doing this for the first 13 pages I've written and now I've found out that I need to undo that.

Is there any place to change this behavior or easily fix existing list item numbers/letters that are styled?

The only way I've found is to select the whole list item (all of its content) and removing teh styling (un-bolding and un-italicizing) and then going back in and re-applying my stylings to its content. Definitely not ideal.

Solution 1:

You can click while holding down alt to select just the list item letter/number and change the styling on it. Unfortunately, it seems that when exporting as a Microsoft Word document some list item letters/numbers get stuck in a certain way despite how they display as a Pages document. Opening the Word document in Pages shows this and with some finagling it can be made to behave. Still, not ideal.

Solution 2:

If your document is intended to be read in Word, you could change this in Word (note that I tried this on an older version of Word, so it might work differently for you):

1. Open the document in Word;
2. Normally select the entire list;
3. Right-click, pick "Bullets and Numbers";
4. Click the button that says Options or Edit or Advanced to the bottom right (can't see it here atm.);
5. Click "Font";
6. Select "standard", or whatever it is called that isn't bold or italicised.

I suspect that Open Office (free and open-source alternative to MS Office, available for Mac) can do the same, so you could try that if you can't get to Word. Incidentally, are you sure a similar function doesn't exist in Pages? I have never used it. Is there perhaps a numbers style to pick that says "custom"?