>Nick (I think) editted the message and took out the PRE tag. The original poster copied some paragraph text from another website and put a PRE tag around it which caused the message to need a huge amount of horizontal scrolling.

Ok, that's what I assumed. PRE is not a good use for that. It is focused to handle code pieces and not to highlight a piece of text.

>It would be nice to be able to use a FONT tag too in order to hilight parts of a post to give a different form of emphasis than we can get using only I and B right now.

There is no restriction on the FONT tag.