My question really is: what is the best way to get word processor formatted text into a WordPress post?
There isn’t one. You should not be writing formatted text. You should be writing plain text and applying formatting through style sheets. The most amount of formatting you should add directly to the post is semantic formatting, such as strong and emphasis tags, or header tags to mark headers… things like that.
The web is not like other publishing methods. You’re not writing content just for people to look at in a web browser. They can view your content in other ways as well. Feeds are the most obvious example, but there’s others. What if they’re viewing it on a handheld browser, like a cell phone? What if they’re printing the content on a black and white printer?
The idea here is that you want your content to be free of design and formatting as much as possible. Semantic tags like making words strong or emphasized are fine, as are links to other URIs and such, but all the actual “look” of a web page should be separated out, because that look may be different in different circumstances and it makes good sense to give your users the most choice in how they want to read your content.
So write in plain text. Then add semantic information to it. By “semantic”, I mean that your formatting should describe the content itself, not how that content should look. Leave the “look” up to your site’s stylesheet. Changes made there can be made across the whole site all at once.
