I want to submit a short story to an online mag that states in its guidelines that it only takes "plain text". I converted my Word doc to .txt. but it loses all the paragraph breaks and italicized text. How do I keep these, or do I have to submit in this ugly form?
i agree about the line breaks, as that's standard for online work... but in re the italics, you really need to ask the publisher, not us... no one else can tell you how it should be typed... no offense intended, banz...
Check the publishers guidelines. If you are still in doubt, email them and ask. As it's online, they may want html for italics, etc. For example, and spaces are added so it will post, < i > < / i > But bottom line is don't guess at what they want. If it isn't clear, ask. If they get a lot of submissions, they will simply throw out things not formatted properly, rather than tell you what is wrong and ask you to fix it.
I did e-mail the editor. He suggested the underscores before and after for italics, but basically said you can't show italics in your submission and that most wait until they're accepted and add the italics in the proofs. So everybody's right - Thanks to everyone!
