Martha,

The reason we don't italicize the botanical name is because it isn't that easy.
In the example you have shown, the last plant should have Zelkova Serrata italicized, but not the 'Schmidtlow' portion.
Also, some users do edit plant names to things like, "Palm Tree TBD", so it would need to recognize such a change, and not italicize that. But then if a user renamed a plant to correct a typo or to specify a different species, then it would suddenly not get italicized.

And then on top of all of there, there are some technical constraints. For plant callouts that have the botanical name as an attribute, that cannot be italicized at all. For the MLeader callouts, and in the schedule, it is possible to apply a font override to a section of text, but this is not guaranteed to work with every SHX font. And then lastly, we would be unable to display the italic in the Plant Info dialog, so troubleshooting any issues with it would be challenging.

It is definitely still on our radar, we would like to be able to address it. As people continue to move away from SHX fonts, and hopefully if AutoCAD could implement a simple HTML style markup to apply italics, then we could start editing the plant names as such.

--J

Thanks a bunch for the explanation. That makes a lot of sense. I will do my part by advocating for non-SHX fonts!