troubleshooting ePub work process from Word documents

I have a collection of 136 Word files from 136 different sources-Mac or PC. In Pages these look OK but when I export to ePub I get into a variety of problems

:

spacing--should be single but can be either 1.5 or 2 lines

font color-different but in some (but not all) cases the color is due to the fact that I have added copy to the original document. It is like "track changes" is being picked up.

Alignment-Titles should be centered but they are either left or right aligned

Unanticipated line breaks.

There is a header item (page #) which I anticipated would be ignored but it is being picked up in the body copy,

So I am wondering if I export the Word document as an rtf from Word then import into Pages. From there export to ePub. What I am speculating is the word document has a lot of formatting that gets in the way during the ePub process.

From another perspective this started with an 8.5 x 11 page format with 1" margins on all sides. Perhaps I should create a template in Word that approaches the dimensions of the ePub document?

Any throughts or suggestions would be helpful.