On April 11th, 2007 StockingStuffer says:

Save as file type RTF file
Turn Smart Quotes OFF in your preferences.

While many of the sites enable the use of smart quotes, it wreaks havoc if the file is downloaded for later viewing. You get some interesting results with smart quotes on when someone downloads a story and not the CSS (cascading style sheet)

It's a band width issue. Save the file to drive and you don't have to open it again and again, sucking up bandwidth.

The problem becomes, files saved in this manner don't always download the site's cascading style sheet that tells the browser how to display the characters.

If you use straight quotes, instead of smart quotes, the issue won't crop up for people that download the file.

Turn off Auto formatting. That will keep special dashes and things like that from appearing

Use a hard return, not a soft return. M$ products just hit enter and it's a hard return. A soft return (Shift + Enter) is the equivalent of a line BREAK. In HTML, that's a line directly below the first.
(br) or (br /) substitue < type brackets
depending on which version html / xml / shtml etc...you're using.

Allow word wrap. It keeps paragraphs together and allows for better HTML as an end result.

I believe FM prefers you break your lines at either 72 or 80 characters. Then again, that was a LONG time ago, so I might be wrong now.

If you want to code simple and I do mean SIMPLE html -- no meta words, no title, no fancy anything -- then:
Save your document in plain text format.

Substitute < style brackets for ( brackets

(html) tells the machine you are viewing an html document. This is the very first line in your document.

(body) the start of viewable data This is the second line in your document.

At the start of each paragraph put the following tag:
(p) starts a line or paragraph

At the end of the paragraph put this tag:
(/p) ends it.
If you want a line break so there is no visible gap between lines, you want a line break.

(br) is a line break

(i) starts italics so put that in front of the word you want the italics to start at. No spaces between the brackets and the word.
(/i) ends it. You can do this for a whole paragraph, or just a word. Remember, this goes right up against the last character in the last word italicised. same for bold.

(b) starts bold and (/b) ends it. = See italics.

& nbsp ; do this with out the spaces, an ampersand immediately followed by the letters nbsp immediately followed by a semicolon (;) is a non printing or more specifically a non-breaking space. If you want more than one space, you need to use this code. You CAN string them together with regular spaces.

(p)& nbsp ;(/p) this gives you a blank line. Remember, delete the spaces. If I don't put the spaces, all you'll see is a space where I have the code.

Use these instead of (p) if you want to change the paragraph formatting a little.
(p align="center") aligns the paragraph so it's centered.
(p align="right") aligns the paragraph so it's right justified.
(p align="justify") aligns the paragraph so it's like news print.

These are general formatting commands and do not need to be within the paragraph (p) tags.
(blockquote) indents everything 1/2 inch
(/blockquote) ends the indent.
Repeating the opening blockquote before ending blockquotes will push the indent further in.
Every time you have an opening tag you need a closing tag, so if you have five (blockquote) tags you need five (/blockquote) tags

These are general formatting commands and do not need to be within the paragraph (p) tags.
(center) aligns everything so it's centred.
(/center) ends the centring effect.

(/body) this signifies the end of your viewable document

(/html) the end of the html document.

Remember use pointed or sharp brackets, NOT curved. Usually it's a shift + comma for left bracket and a shift + period or full stop for the right bracket.

Hope this helps