Format the text so it uses plain ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) text. ASCII text is basically the numbers, letters and punctuation found on a standard U.S. keyboard with no accented letters. If your text has accented letters that cannot be removed, you can use the appropriate ISO-8859 character set for those letters. You will still need to submit a plain ASCII version without the accents to Project Gutenberg.
Format each line so it contains about 60 to 70 characters per line with a hard return at the end (CR/LF, or carriage return/line feed). Lines cannot exceed 72 characters.
Transliterate any Greek text so it uses Latin letters. Gutenberg has a special page that instructs how to do this (see Resources).
Replace italics by placing them in all caps (ITALICS), by placing an underscore before and after the word or words (_italics_) or by placing a backslash before and after the word or words (/italics/). Underscores tend to be favored, but it doesn't matter which of the three methods you choose as long as you use the same method each time.
Place four blank lines before each chapter heading and two lines after the heading. You can also use three blank lines before and one blank line after. Place a black line before each paragraph. Place a line of spaced asterisks (* * * * *) anywhere extra spacing or markings were used to indicate scene breaks or character shifts.
Place 20 spaces before text that needs to be indented. You should not indent the beginning of paragraphs. Do not use the tab key to indent.
Use one hyphen (-) in place of en-dashes and two hyphens (--) in place of em-dashes. Do not place a space before or after two hyphens when using them to represent an em-dash in most cases. A row of six hyphens (------) should be used to indicate words that are left out. If dashes are used to replace letters in a word, use one hyphen for each letter that has been left out.
Insert a short footnote in brackets at the point in the paragraph where they occur if they are short. Longer footnotes can be inserted after the paragraph -- either contiguous with the paragraph if they are a line long or as a new paragraph if they are longer. Footnotes that are longer than a paragraph can be placed at the end of the chapter. It is also permissible to place all footnotes, regardless of length, at the end of the chapter. You can place a number in brackets in the text to indicate where the footnote goes.
Transform any tables into columns using a non-proportional font. Indent the table slightly to set it off from the main text so it won't be automatically wrapped by a converter later.
Format poems, letters and journal entries so they are the same way as the book they were printed in.
Run the text through gutcheck. Gutcheck is a program that looks for problems spellcheckers do not, such as mismatched quotes and misplaced punctuation. It was designed to check texts for submission to Project Gutenberg.