This puzzle is driving me crazy. Maybe someone else has ideas? Hint 2 seems to indicate that it is word lengths that are important.

Here are the words lengths divided up by sentence:

I am not sure to make of hint 1 (no italics in any last word of sentence).

Can't see anything obvious, but frogs/toads/newts are all 5 letters (with dogs/horses being 4/6). Baconian cipher uses 5 letter (A/B) blocks, which also could account for italics in random words...

Good point. I had though Baconian, but it seems like there are far too many AAAAA runs. Maybe just selected blocks? The first line translated in Baconian yields (if I am doing it right):

Oops, I had forgotten to include the title on my word lengths post. It should have stared with:

8 5 5 2 5 2 3 5

I keep wondering if the reference to "Super 8" is a hint or if it just needed to end a sentence with a five and one letter word.

Yeah, I tried baconian based on if a whole word has italics or not too and it was still gibberish.

Here's the index of each italicised word:

where double digits (eg. 23) are index 2 and 3. With the exception of [13] towards the end, which is actually index 13

All 1 based indexing with 0 meaning no italics in the word

(sorry said "index of each italicised word", meant "index of each italicised letter in each word")

That being said, there has to be some importance in the fact that the last word (per sentence) is never italicised...

Oh, too many number. Never mind me. Bye :D

It would be tragic if the italics were just a red herring.

@axavio They probably are...

Vowel / consonant Baconian?

@AE That would be too hard to construct, I think.

Have we truly considered what the first hint means? I think we all came to the conclusion that Baconian cipher uses 5 letters and hint two MIGHT allude to that. But why would hint 1 state that the last word never has an italic... The idea has also been thrown around that maybe the italics are a red-herring. I was thinking that myself, but hint 1 specifically drew attention to them, so I find it unlikely.

So my question would be "Why would differentiating the last word of a sentence from the rest of the sentence make any difference?"

Word containing italics / word not containing italics Baconian?

@AE - both axavio and Alconja tried several different versions of baconian based off the words but it was all gibberish. You can read about that above.