Tacyon's phrasing is admirable -- wish I'd said it first! ( and read 405192 et seq, as well -- inserted 1700GMT) -- but sparks a small question.

Based on wordsmith's original description, won't cleaning up the "puke" "vomit" bovine manure (ok, "markup" or "formatting") be almost as important to the desired "consistency" as emending the actual text? The boldfacing, ^{font changes}, etc. in the original .doc may be formatting conventions for which consistency is also desired.

Also, curious (enough so to read/experiment soon, unless some oracle here knows with certainty) whether HTML parser can actually make sense of the many conditionals Word inserts while saving as .html garbage.