Messages posted to the Czernowitz-L group must be in Plain Text format. If you don’t understand what Plain Text means, here’s a very simple explanation:
Text documents come in two flavours – rich text and plain text. Plain text, as you might have guessed, is rather plain. It supports standard ASCII characters, including numbers, letters, symbols, punctuation and spaces, but does not support any type of text formatting. Therefore you cannot apply bold, italic, or underlined styles, and you cannot use different fonts or font sizes or colours in a plain text document. Because plain text does not contain information about text sizes or styles, it is the most efficient way to store text. Plain text documents often take up less than half the size of rich text documents containing the same number of characters. It is also the most secure format short of using encryption.
Another way of looking at plain text is to think of a standard typewriter of old — one font, one size, one colour, and a limited number of characters. Compare this to word processed documents.
The List software requires plain text. If your message is not in plain text, the moderators have to edit out the rich text from the message by hand. This is a time consuming process, and sometimes results in lost and/or unreadable messages.
Now, how to post in Plain Text with Gmail:
In FirstPic (below), you’ll see there is a little grey arrow in the Lower Right corner of the Compose message screen (next to the trash can).
Click on that arrow and you get SecondPic. Then click on Plain Text Mode and you’ll see a check mark appear to the left of the word “Plain” (ThirdPic)
Click anywhere back in the text of your message and the menu in lower right will disappear and you’ll see the words “Plain Text” (Third Pic) appear briefly at the bottom bar of your message, followed by the word “Saved”.
You only have to do this once, all messages you send will be in Plain Text from then on, unless of course, you change it back.
Prepared by Bruce Reisch & Jerome Schatten