exporting to html

Has anyone been able to process bold and italic to the now current <strong> and <em> or indeed able to create a <span> automatically. I have worked around the <span> by using new paragraph tags, but it is not really satisfactory. Do the character tags allow you to process them into <span> tags?

I am trying to avoid bloated html code and have done quite well with simpler documents. Now I want to get complicated and I am a little stumped.

Thanks for your help.

Regards,

Stilman