Does anyone know of a program that will strip away the formatting and any special characters (like curly quotes) from a selection of text?  I find that notepad usually does that, and/or pasting text into my Movable Type blog interface, but sometimes it doesn’t work, I guess.  I mean, to me, it looks fine, but when I send it to someone else, sometimes weird characters pop up, or more recently, weird quotes (and in random places!).  

 It would also be nice if anyone knew of a way to add simple HTML to a document, such as <i>italics</i> tags, and link code.  The Movable Type interface does that, or did; when we upgraded to 3.2 just recently, I noticed that it doesn’t use the standard tags anymore.  Now, when you tell it to italicize something, it puts <em>italics</em> tags around it.  Which is fine for MT, but not acceptable for my purposes.  (My purposes are writing my SCI FI Wire pieces; I have to turn them in with that kind of simple HTML included.)