1. They are gi-noromous. I just tried converting a 172k Word document that had one included photo (a probably 150k JPG) to RTF. The resulting file was 17 MB! This was using Word 97, so perhaps it's just being silly about how it does the conversion. It's worth checking into for whatever method you're using, though. Storage cost aside, I can't believe it wouldn't significantly slow access on the Reader.
2. You might try doing this:
- Search for italics (using the advanced search/replace menu) and "replace all" italics with a type face not in the doucment (e.g. Vendi).
- Set all character formatting to "regular". This won't will change type faces, so the parts that were in italics are still identifiable.
- Search for the type face you substituted for italics and replace it with italics and the correct type face for your document (e.g. Arial).
Worked for me, but I wasn't sure about how you did the CTRL-SPACE trick. I just did step two by selecting all the text, then pulling up the format/font menu and selecting "Regular" font style, leaving the other boxes blank. Should be pretty easy to make a macro of this, if you need it often.
3. You can have headers and footers in RTF, but CONNECT seems to ignore them
