I did a bit of work writing a Slash plugin to display printable pages, but it uses the Template Toolkit.

If you're convinced that stripping tricky tags out of HTML is efficacious, either look into a module like HTML::Parser or tilly's Why I Like Functional Programming. The trick is to make a list of allowed tags, removable tags, and tags that should be dropped, leaving their content intact.

If you have a good handle on what should and shouldn't be allowed, an afternoon or two should be sufficient.

Does that help?