acro package: Italicize first occurrence of term

Question

I am using the acro package for acronyms because, for a phrase that is not a proper name, I can have the first letter of each word uncapitalized except when it starts off a sentence, in which case the very first letter of the phrase is capitalized. Like other packages, it allows user-specification of plural forms for the acronym and the long phrase. Unlike other packages, it provides these capabilities without having to externally make an index. It is not a full fledge glossary package, but it meets my needs for acronyms.

For the acro package, is there a way to italicize the first occurrence of the phrase, when the acronym is introduced, but without italicizing the acronym itself? The vanilla way of introducing a phrase and its acronym is \ac{label}, which expands to the phrase followed by its acronym in brackets. The command \textit{\ac{label}} causes both the phrase and the acronym to be italicized.

I know that the acronym package (as opposed to the acro package) does the proper italicization with \acfi{label}, at least according to ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/pub//tex/macros/lat ... cronym.pdf. However, this is not recognized using the acro package.

I'm not sure if a MWE is needed for this question, but here is a toy file:

  \documentclass{article}
     \usepackage{acro}
     \DeclareAcronym{abc}{
        short=ABC,
        long=alpha bettick crisps
     }
  \begin{document}

     The objective of this report is to test acronyms like
     \ac{abc}.  \acresetall \Ac{abc} are delicious.

     \acresetall
     \textit{\ac{abc}}.

     \cleardoublepage
     \printacronyms[%
        name = {Abbreviations},
        sort = false
     ]

  \end{document}

Answer 1

You can use the first-long-format key wich controls the format for the long form on first usage (with \ac, \acf or \acflike and their uppercase, plural and indefinite forms).

\acsetup{first-long-format=\itshape}

A complete example:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{acro}

\DeclareAcronym{abc}{
  short=ABC,
  long=alpha bettick crisps
}

\acsetup{first-long-format=\itshape}

\begin{document}

The objective of this report is to test acronyms like
\ac{abc}.  \acresetall\Ac{abc} are delicious.

\ac{abc}.

\cleardoublepage
\printacronyms[%
  name = {Abbreviations},
  sort = false,
]

\end{document}

The text in the document:

The entry in the list:

Using

\acsetup{long-format=\itshape}

will italicize the long form of the acronym everywhere (including the list of acronyms).

One can do this on a per acronym basis (thanks to cgnieder) using the first-long-format or long-format keys in the acronym declaration:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{acro}

\DeclareAcronym{abc}{
  short=ABC,
  long=alpha bettick crisps
}
\DeclareAcronym{def}{
  short=DEF,
  long=delta elphic furs,
  first-long-format=\itshape
}

\begin{document}

The objective of this report is to test acronyms like
\ac{abc}.  \acresetall\Ac{abc} are delicious.
The objective of this report is to test acronyms like
\ac{def}.  \acresetall\Ac{def} are delicious.

\cleardoublepage
\printacronyms[%
  name = {Abbreviations},
  sort = false,
]

\end{document}