You know the answer to this. Look at the code. Maybe you can minimise each decorative character by simply modifying one line in the stylesheet. Or, as @jackie_w says, maybe there's a naming system that will let you turn:
<img alt="BigA" src="../Images/BigA.jpg"/><p>ardvark</p>
into:
<p>Aardvark</p>
with a simple bit of Regex. I hope so!