Select Text Macro

[KXFID]

Good day, I am hoping this is so bloody obvious to someone that help is near.

Consider a piece of text like this.

The quick brown fox
jumped over the lazy old dog.

Noting that jumped and dog are in italics. I would like to change it to be
The quick brown fox
\ijumped\i over the lazy
old \idog\i.

Today saving as PDB loses all formatting. While it would be better if PDB did not, if I can convert to PML, I can get around the format loss.

Any help appreciated.
-Cheers.