I don't think you're missing anything... each item, down to the level you require (paragraph, sentence, word, character) would have to be checked and tagged accordingly.
But I'm not clear on what your requirement is... I took it to be writing to a text file (which has no formatting, like bold and fonts etc, it's just text).
Testing and tagging all the formatting and writing out an html file is possible but would be relatively complex.
If you want to retain the formatting, you will need some target document that will support it. In terms of single line solutions, if you copy the text, you will be able to use PasteSpecial with one of the html formats in PowerPoint or PasteAndFormat in Word.
But what do you want to end up with?