Graham,
Don't worry about the word count. If a member is writing interestingly about anything connected with junk rig, it will all go in, however much I have to expand the magazine. I will only trim anything that gets repetitious, and decline anything where facts are questionable, ideas are put forward that are totally untried and seem unworkable - things like that. The technical forum is a better place to air off-the-wall ideas than the magazine.
I prefer to receive plain text from a simple text editor, rather than highly-formatted word processor output, because I have to do quite a lot to standardise the font, the font size and the layout, and the first thing I have to do is remove all the unwanted line returns, etc, that a word processor puts in. Use bold, italics and underline if you want to, but not much more.
Usually, the text is sent to Annie, for her sharp eyes to pick out the typos, and it may also be sent to technically able members for peer review, where there is doubt over the validity of what's being said.
Photos that are uploaded to the photogallery get degraded in the process, and are not suitable for printing at a large size, though they do well enough for a small thumbnail illustration of a point. Please email the photos in jpg format, separately from the text, at the highest resolution you have, and include a caption with each one. The better the resolution, the larger I can make it on the page.
If you want to take things a step further, and embed photos into a word processor document and then export as a pdf, that's fine, and you could then always add it yourself to the "Your files" section of the website. But I would still prefer the raw material to work with in editing the magazine.