Re point 3 above. Trick to convert HTML to text in preparation to re-layout,
Open the .html in a web browser; (Firefox in my case),
Select what you want and Copy/Paste into a plain text editor; (I use Editpad lite or NotePad++ ). This discards most of the html tags, meta, scripts, pictures and borders etc. The <br> tags get removed which will crunch sentences together and which will need dealing with when formatting/styling.
That leaves all the text more or less intact for Copying into your 'fancy' editor (Summernote or TinyMCE).