[BillSmithBooks]

I also miss bold and italic in plaintext, especially since italic can be so critical in pointing out emphasis or noting internal thoughts of characters.

Do any of you bother to replicate some of that formating in plaintext?

Normally the use of _ or / indicates italic (_italic_ or /italic/) while * indicates bold (*bold*).

When I'm converting from another format like RTF, I save it to HTML, then open up my html editor and do an automated search and replace to change the <i> and </i> to _ and the <b> and </b> to * before saving to txt.

It gives me some idea of the original formatting when reading in plain text and while not as direct as actually having italic and bold, I find it to be close enough that my mind interprets it without having to stop and think about it. Plus, plaintext is flexible enough that I can read it on any device I want.