Oh! I see. Yeah, italics - I probably wouldn't have known what you meant even if you'd said cursive, since that just means handwriting that looks like this. At least in U.S. English, that's the case. It could have different connotations elsewhere.

Yeah, it's a lot easier with short pieces. When I posted up my first FE contest thing, which was ~2k words, it ate my formatting something like 3 times - and it was a piece with lots of italics and quotes. Not. Fun.