Is there a reason you don't want to use CSS? Because, there are already CSS extensions that do exactly what you want. The book Cascading Style Sheets - Designing for the web, was written using only HTML and CSS and prepped for printing using PrinceXML. The PrinceXML web site has a bunch of HTML+CSS similar samples, including academic papers.
Is there a reason you don't want to use CSS? Because, there are already CSS extensions that do exactly what you want. The book Cascading Style Sheets - Designing for the web, was written using only HTML and CSS and prepped for printing using PrinceXML. The PrinceXML web site has a bunch of HTML+CSS similar samples, including academic papers.