Newline-phobic text help.

[R. Clayton]

I use emacs and firefox's it's all text add-on to fill in web text-entry forms.
Because those forms break text to the line width, I use the enriched-text minor
mode under the assumption that soft newlines don't show up in the resulting
text.  That assumption seems to be incomplete: the soft newlines are gone, but
the text in the form has (hard) newlines at the places the text in the buffer
had soft newlines (resizing the form verifies this claim).

Enriched text saved to a local disk file has the same property -
intra-paragraph soft newlines are replaced by hard newlines - which leads me to
believe I don't understand enriched text.  What are the emacs incantations that
keep hard newlines out of paragraphs when the buffer's written to wherever?