Thanks for your reply, Guessed, sorry about my late response.
My browser is Opera. I haven't tried any others.
I tried Ctrl-Space and Ctrl-Q on a copy of a formatted document and it deleted the entire content!
Edit - Clear - Format worked though, and the result pasted into my gmail draft with no problem other than a couple of words disappearing. All font and sizes remained the same.
The problem is that I'm submitting work to a publishing agent and at the bare minimum I need double spacing, italics and paragraph/speech line indents.
I'll experiment some more and report back.
Thanks again.