Setting characters to italic within a textframe -- two problems

Question

Hi!  I'm trying to set the font for specific characters (or words) to italics within the contents of a textframe.  The font I'm using is Helvetica.  The first problem is that when I try to set the .Italics property to TRUE, there is no effect, i.e., the text does not appear italicized.  For example:
          With tfrmTopLine2 '(This is a text frame object)
                .Contents = "Harry met Sally"
                .TextRange.CharacterAttributes.TextFont = appIll.TextFonts.Item("Helvetica")
                .TextRange.CharacterAttributes.Italics = True
            End With
The text does not appear italicized.  For the Helvetica font I'm using, the italics type face is named "Helvetica Bold Oblique".  I've tried referencing that font name but it doesn't work, i.e., the font remains unitalicized. 
Now, assuming that I (we) can figure out how to set italics, then I need to change just specified characters within the text frame to italics.  In the example above, imagine that I wanted to just make the word "and" italics so that the sentence would read, "Harry met Sally".  I will always know the positions of first and last characters of the word to change and I have no problem looping through the relevant characters to make the change... ONCE I know what I need to do to make a character italics.
Thanks for the help!!!
Bob

Answer 1

I solved this myself so thought I'd share what I learned.
When setting a font to other than the default regular style of that font, you need to use the precise name of the sub font.  For example, I discovered I needed to use the following:
     appIll.TextFonts.Item("Helvetica-Oblique")
The challenge is that I didn't know that precise name.  So I programmatically interrogated a textFrame that I had already set the font as I wanted it in Illustrator.  Basically, I wrote a textFrame to a Ai document, went into debug mode right after that, then manually changed the font to what I wanted it to look like, then did the following:
MsgBox tfrmTextFrame.TextRange.CharacterAttributes.TextFont.Name
That gave me the name I needed to refer to in code.