Thank you Enjorous & Amber...
Yes, I read the introduction to simplemachines, but couldn't find many specifics on "how to".
And I'm not sure what you mean by opening the post in different tabs... When I hit the quote button, all I get is the HTML for quotes. Do I hit the quote button on the specific posts I want to quote? Do I go back and cut and paste between the " " as it were? At another forum I spend quite a bit of time at, if you want to quote multiple posts, there's a checkbox - almost invisible - that you have to check in each of the posts you want to quote. Is it something like that?
Thanks in any case, for answering my call for help
Ona
If you want to quote a single post, hit the quote button at the top of that post, and all the quote code necessary to quote that single post will be pregenerated. The guaranteed way to quote multiple quotes is to right click and hit "open link in new tab" (your browser might say something slightly different) on the quote button of the secondary posts youw ant to quote, and then copy and paste them into the post you are generating.
A shortcut that I don't frequently use, is that if all the posts you want to quote are in the topic you are responding and are all recent (within the last 10 or so posts, if they are on another page you will have to use the above technique) you can generate additional quotes by clicking the "insert quote" links below the reply window while you are typing your reply.
Finally, sometimes you will want to quote something that isn't in a post (like text from the books, or from another website), or is in a locked post.
In that case type out what you want to quote or copy/paste it, and then highlight it and hit the "quote button" above the crying smiley above the reply window, and a quote code without a link in the header will be generated. You can change the header so that it cites what you are quoting instead of just saying "quote" by changing the first bit of code from {quote} to {quote="my source"} using [] rather than {} of course