I think it’s not possible to do this if your attributes are animated. Size, opacity and italic are character attributes. As soon as you change the character, it loses those attributes. It assigns all attributes the current state, but with no keyframes. You cant even copy the original keyframes and paste them into the new type node. Sadly I think this is a feature, not a bug. You can animate the size using the axis scale. You can animate the opacity with a dissolve on the timeline. You can animate the italic with shear. This can all be done for Layer, Paragraph or Character. They all behave a little differently. The shear centre does not follow the axis centre.