How do I get pure text?

[Eli Meir]

I have gotten a few complaints about my Biology Education Software FAQ
from people who say that the format I use is unreadable.  It has lots
of control characters in it and the text is all mushed up.  I get this
problem too when I try to read it on a unix machine.  I am writing the
FAQ on a Macintosh in MS Word.  I save it as Text Only (I've also tried
Text w/ line breaks).  Does anyone out there know how I would get a
pure text file saved, without any extra garbage, in such a way that the
file could be read on any machine (having tabs and paragraph breaks
would be nice, though).

Thanks a lot in advance.

Eli Meir
Dept of Zoology, Univ of Washington
meir at zoology.washington.edu