This snippet works as expected (with sentence 2 of para 2 italicized) on my system. My OpenOffice::OODoc is version 2.023, and other details (Windows XP, late model Perl, recent drop of OpenOffice, etc.) are similar. You might want to update your OpenOffice::OODoc modules. I see from http://cpan.uwinnipeg.ca/htdocs/OpenOffice-OODoc/Changes.html a fairly recent comment 'Text.pm: added an improved version of extendText()' that could affect your code.