Editor – HTML Behavior

I’m creating a WP site to publicize a book. I would like to put a book excerpt page on the site. I’m focusing on one particular page style (used in about 90 pages) that has a lot of formatting (indents, bolds, italics). I’ve built a test version of that page style, saved it from Word as web-page filtered, and can review and tweak it in Notepad++. However, without any tweaks, I can look at that page in a browser, and upload it to Amazon Kindle (to review in Kindle for PC), and it looks the way I intended. In particular, the document has <p> </p> notation and associated “p.” styles, and in the browser and in Kindle they create a single line return, not a double line return.

The test page html code is at the end of this post.

When I copy the entire page of html to WP page editor (html mode), and view the page, everything looks good except that:
– It shows a double line break for each <p>
– It throws in line breaks any time the “source” has a line break (even if not <b> or <p>.

I’m looking for a way to get the page to look the way I would like in WordPress, without the double line breaks and other problem. One issue I see is that if I take out the paragraph notation, then I don’t see how to make the styles change from one line to the next.

If I have to, I will recreate the entire page in WP from scratch, however, I would still want to be able to bold one line, and then indent and unbold the line immediately following without a double line break.

Any suggestions about this would be appreciated.

Thanks!

[Large code excerpt removed by moderator per forum rules. Please use the pastebin for all large code excerpts. It works better anyway.]