[Solitaire1]

Originally Posted by 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.

In a related note, in my own stories in addition to using italics to indicate a character's thoughts, I also surround the thought text with "[" and "]" (I treat them the same as I would quotation marks). This makes it easy to identify the thought text even without the italics and those marks carry over into other formats. It also has the advantage that is the only time that I make regular use those punctuation marks so they stand out.

I like the idea of using HTML tags to indicate the character formatting in plain text files. It avoids possible confusion. For example, when I see "_" in a plain text file, to me that means underlining begins/ends at that point rather than italics. It also has the advantage that converting it into a proper HTML file is just a matter of adding a few tags, especially if you include all of the other HTML tags (such as the "p" tags) except for the opening and closing tags.