Interestingly enough, this is precisely the part of AbiWord
I dislike the most. The second is lack of named styles. I
think a *killer* feature for AbiWord would be to produce
semantically meaningful XML documents (unlike the MS
Office 2000 crap which is slightly better than AbiWord in
some respects, far worse in others).
I've been planning to spend a bit of time working on this
in AbiWord. I think the "guts" are basically OK, so it's
mostly an import/exprt problem.
I don't know if Eric remembers me from the early days of
HTML...