Format an .odt document for Blogger?

I have found that if you copy and paste an .odt document into Blogger, the copied test gets ugly html paragraph formatting added, different from the native Blogger formatting. My workaround is to copy and paste from Writer to a text editor, then copy and paste to Blogger. But then I lose italics.

Is there a way I could preserve all character formatting in Writer without the space and paragraph formatting that Blogger interprets?

See this post on the Blogger forum for some ideas.