What Is This Thing Called ".txt" ?

[cleome45.livejournal.com]

Laugh at me all you want, but I could still use some help.

I didn't have much warning before I discovered that FF.net had pretty much gotten rid of HTML as a means of uploading documents. (Did anyone?) I need help figuring out if it's possible to preserve formatting when uploading a document that's been saved only as ".txt"

I have access to both OpenOffice and MS Word, but neither preserves formatting at all-- at least for me.

Oh, and I'm a Mac OS X user, though a few months ago I was still using a regular old PC to upload HMTL docs to FF.net.

This old neo-Luddite appreciates any help you can give. :)