Exporting plain or rich text made easier

It was always a frustration to me that when I exported an outline to a plain or rich text document, or to Word or Pages, I got this weird formatting, with dashes and brackets that I then had to remove.

I’m embarrassed at how long it took me to figure this out, but by going into Text Import and Export Preferences, and removing all those Bullets and Checkboxes - leaving those boxes empty - the exported text is then clean and presentable as text only.

One question: when I export it as Plain Text, I now get one empty space at the first line of the paragraph (item).

In Rich Text, the first line starts flush with the left margin, no empty space before the paragraph’s first word.

Any idea why?

Go to Preferences > RTF Export and you’ll see the options for outputting to plain rich text.