A Little Unsolicited Technical Support
I remember talking a little while back to someone who was complaining about having to hand-format a story to conform to the fairly strict formatting guidelines for Multiverse, to which I replied that it shouldn't be necessary to hand-format at all, because it's fairly easy if you're working in Word to get the software to do it for you. Only actually figuring out how to make Word do it is a different matter altogether and can be kind of a pain in the ass, so I figured I'd share the method I eventually found for converting italics and such into HTML tags suitable for posting on LJ, etc., for anybody who'd like to know how to do it. (I don't know about anybody else, but I much prefer to use actual italics and things while I'm writing, so I can see exactly how the finished product will look when I'm done.)
Here's what you do:
Go to the Edit menu and choose "replace." When the find-and-replace window comes up, go down to the bottom of it and hit the "more" button. Then hit "format" and choose "font" from the menu that comes up. It will then give you a "find font" window. Choose "italic" and hit "OK." Then, in the "replace with" field, type "< I>^&< /I>" (only leave out the extra spaces I put in there so LJ wouldn't get confused). If you can't remember that "^&" thing -- and I never can -- you can instead click on "special" and choose "Find What Text," and it'll fill it in for you. Then just hit "replace all." It'll insert the < I> and < /I> before and after all your italics. You can use basically the same procedure to replace bold with "< B>" and < /B>" tags. When you're finished converting all your formating, do a "Save as," choose "plain text" as the file type, reassure Word that, yes, that really is what you want to do, and you're set!
One other tip that may be useful for some folks. If you're using smart quotes... Well, first of all, if you're using smart quotes, can I beg you not to? Really, they're useless and, IMHO, rather ugly, and they don't necessarily show up properly on non-Windows systems. Believe me, a story, no matter how good, which has "?"s every place there should be a quotation mark or an apostrophe is pretty much unreadable, no matter how well written it is. But if you are using smart quotes and want to replace them with regular quotes, I believe you can do so like this: First, turn off smart quotes by going to the "Format" menu, choosing "Autoformat," choosing "options," then selecting the "Autoformat" tab and unchecking the option to autoformat with smart quotes. Then do a replace-all in which you put " in both the find and replace fields. Then do the same for the apostrophes. That should change all your curly quotes with regular ones.
Note: I make absolutely no guarantees that this stuff will work for everybody on all versions of Word with all possible settings.
Here's what you do:
Go to the Edit menu and choose "replace." When the find-and-replace window comes up, go down to the bottom of it and hit the "more" button. Then hit "format" and choose "font" from the menu that comes up. It will then give you a "find font" window. Choose "italic" and hit "OK." Then, in the "replace with" field, type "< I>^&< /I>" (only leave out the extra spaces I put in there so LJ wouldn't get confused). If you can't remember that "^&" thing -- and I never can -- you can instead click on "special" and choose "Find What Text," and it'll fill it in for you. Then just hit "replace all." It'll insert the < I> and < /I> before and after all your italics. You can use basically the same procedure to replace bold with "< B>" and < /B>" tags. When you're finished converting all your formating, do a "Save as," choose "plain text" as the file type, reassure Word that, yes, that really is what you want to do, and you're set!
One other tip that may be useful for some folks. If you're using smart quotes... Well, first of all, if you're using smart quotes, can I beg you not to? Really, they're useless and, IMHO, rather ugly, and they don't necessarily show up properly on non-Windows systems. Believe me, a story, no matter how good, which has "?"s every place there should be a quotation mark or an apostrophe is pretty much unreadable, no matter how well written it is. But if you are using smart quotes and want to replace them with regular quotes, I believe you can do so like this: First, turn off smart quotes by going to the "Format" menu, choosing "Autoformat," choosing "options," then selecting the "Autoformat" tab and unchecking the option to autoformat with smart quotes. Then do a replace-all in which you put " in both the find and replace fields. Then do the same for the apostrophes. That should change all your curly quotes with regular ones.
Note: I make absolutely no guarantees that this stuff will work for everybody on all versions of Word with all possible settings.