First the concepts. What these programs want is a plain ASCII text file. ASCII text is just text, no formatting like italics or bolding or font changes. It is just eight bits per letter, plain and simple. This is the lowest common denominator of the computer text world. Word processors fill up the text with a bunch of control characters and other non-ASCII bytes. The object of this exercise is to change formatted text into plain ASCII format. In the process we will have go give up italics, bolding, fonts, etc.

I will assume that you are using MS Word but this, or some slight variation, should work for other word processors.

First you have to get rid of font problems. Mark all your text, ctrl A in Word, then change the font to a MONOSPACED font like Courier. This makes each letter take up the same amount of space on the line.

Then do a File, Save As, and pick Text Only .txt instead of .doc in the bottom dialogue. It will warn you that you will loose all your formatting, but that is what we want.

Next open this file that we just did a Save As and cut and paste it into your email or newsreader program.

Shortcuts to use:

CTRL+A - highlight all text
CTRL+C - copy all highlighted text
CTRL+V - paste

Also note -

CTRL+X - cut all highlighted
CTRL+Z - undo last action
CTRL+Y - undo the undo!