Well I worked out a round-about way of doing what we needed, it's not pretty though and does not take mobile phones into consideration which as I say is not a priority for what we are doing. This is what I've suggested they do.....
1. hit "quote" as before.
2. highlight ALL the text in the reply box and "cut" it.
3. open notepad and paste the copy into it.
You should now be looking at the grid in the same way as before with everything aligned and all the bbcode tags.
4. remove the "quote" tags at the beginning and end of the post.
5. make your selections.
6. highlight and copy the complete amended grid.
7. go back to the reply box.
8. paste the amended notepad content that you just copied into the reply box.
9. Do a preview to make sure it looks ok.
10. post your reply
Not pretty, but it works.
I still think if the default font was Courier New instead of Arial it would work as before but have no way of testing that.
