An ASCII file is just a plain text file, formatting, fonts selection, and all
other attributes are ignored and what you get is plain text in 10 pitch
courier. Saving at text w/Layout would keep the general layout of the
document fairly intact, but you would still lose bold, italic and other
formatting selections.
which will point you to a number of Word discussion groups, one o
which may better explain why a text only format file does not retai
non-text attributes.