Computer viruses hidden in e-mail attachments are bringing down company computer systems all over the world. What's a job hunter sending out resumes to do?

Paste them directly into your e-mail, after your brief cover letter. To make sure they look professional, save your resume first as a plain-text (or ASCII) document, and you'll avoid a sloppy or otherwise funky appearance. Sounds good, but just what, you may ask, is plain text or ASCII? The following excerpt from Joyce Lain Kennedy's "Resumes for Dummies 4th edition" (Wiley, 2003) offers step-by-step instructions and tips on preparing a resume that's ready to e-mail.

ASCII (pronounced "AS-kee") is an acronym that stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange and is used to describe plain-text files that have no graphics, no rule lines, no bullets, no italics, and so on. No-frills files may be referred to simply as ASCII, or plain text, or ASCII plain text; all three terms mean the same thing -- files that can be universally understood by computers everywhere in the world. An ASCII message is straight text and allows for almost no formatting. ASCII is so dreary in design that even its mother (if it had one) couldn't love it. Even so, almost everyone has been using this one-size-fits-all file to avoid communications miscues between such popular word-processing programs as MS Word and WordPerfect that run on various computer platforms, such as PCs, Macintoshes and others. Here's the drill.

To create a plain-text resume, start with your formatted, printable resume. Open your formatted resume, make a copy of the computer file, name it "yourname.txt" (or anything else with the ".txt" extension) and tell the computer to save it as a text-only document. Alternatively, type your electronic version from scratch in your favorite word-processing program, saving it as a text-only document and naming it "yourname.txt." Because your resume now has ASCII for brains, it won't recognize the formatting commands that your word-processing program uses. So be on guard against the following common errors.

Typeface and font

Don't expect a particular typeface or size in your ASCII resume. The typeface and fonts appear in the typeface and size that the recipient's computer is set for. This means that boldface, italics or different font sizes will not appear in the online plain-text version.

Word wrap

Don't use the word-wrap feature when writing your resume because it will look as weird as a serial letter "E" running vertically down a page. Odd-looking word wrapping is one of the cardinal sins of online resumes. Set your margins at 0 and 65, or set the right margin at 6 1/2 inches. Then end each line after 65 characters with hard carriage returns. Just press the Enter key to insert line breaks.

Proportional typefaces

Don't use proportional typefaces that have different widths for different characters (such as Times Roman). Instead, use a fixed-width typeface (such as Courier). Then, you will know that you have a true 65-character line. For example, if you compose and send your resume in Courier 12 and it's received in the Arial typeface, it should still work well with most e-mail programs, surviving transport with a close resemblance to the original line length.

Special characters

Don't use any characters that aren't on your keyboard, such as "smart quotes" (those tasteful, curly quotation marks, not the straight, wooden, inch-mark variety on this page) or mathematical symbols. They don't convert correctly, and your resume will need fumigating to rid itself of squiggles and capital U's.

Remember that you can use dashes and asterisks (they're on the keyboard), but you can't use bullets (they're not on the keyboard).

Although you can't use bullets, bold, or underlined text in a plain-text document, you can use plus signs (+) at the beginning of lines to draw attention to part of your document. You can also use a series of dashes to separate sections and capital letters to substitute for boldface. When you don't know what else to use to sharpen your ASCII effort, you can always turn to Old Reliable -- white space.

Tabs

Don't use tabs because they get wiped out in the conversion to ASCII. Use your space bar instead.

Alignment

Don't expect your resume to be full-justified. Your ASCII resume is automatically left-justified. If you need to indent a line or center a heading, use the spacebar.

Page numbers

Don't use page numbers. You can't be certain where the page breaks will fall and your name and page number could end up halfway south on a page.

Spell check

Don't forget to spell check before you save your resume as an ASCII file.

A Final Check

After you think that your resume is ready to roll, write a short cover note (using the same technical guidelines as for your resume). Leading off with the cover note cut and paste the text of both your note and resume into the body of the e-mail message. Send the message to yourself and to a friend, and then compare responses. This last check should reveal flaws in your technique, giving you a chance to mend before you send.