So this might help a bit, but basically there's two ways of setting the colour/pattern of text in a field. It sounds like what you're doing is using the "select a bunch of text and change it with the text menu" option, which yeah does seem to not affect newly added text. But you can also select the field in widget mode, go into the properties (double-click or widget -> properties) and then there's a "pattern" button. If you set the pattern or colour there, that becomes the default for that field, so when you're writing into it in interact mode it'll come up as the colour you want. Hopefully this helps / makes sense.