Hey Jackibar!
The first step in making things easier is to ditch the Mac.... lol
Seriously though, there are a few program's that people have written to do what you suggest. There is one that you can find on this thread
HERE that works very well for "Word on a PC"...but I'm not sure if they have been tried on the Mac...I have looked over the code on the linked macro and I didn't see anything that stood out as bad. You may have some luck with it - are you any good at transcribing code??
There are also a some more editing tools that I have seen discussed in this thread
HERE...but I haven't used them.
If you have some knowledge/experience with search/replace in Pages you can:
- replace the end paragraph markers with </p><p>
- replace anything formatted as bold/italics with the proper <b><i> tags
- replace lines formatted as headers with the appropriate <h> tag
Then SelectAll from the main screen and copy/paste into your favorite text editor or directly into an html page in Sigil. That keeps the html tags but gets rid of ALL the extraneous codes.
I hope that helps!