Ideas. 
1. Preview your templates (in the run time)  and copy what you want.   This way no html code is present.   Copy this back into the RTC.

2. Maybe take the run time version copy and paste it into MS word first.  (I shudder…)

3. Finally if you look at the RTC in the XML you’ll see the HTML code.  Its just all url encoded so it doesn’t break the XML structure.  You could take your template HTML and run it through a URLEncoder, and then paste that mess into the XML of the RTC. 

I better stop.  this is getting really hacky. 

#3 might be the way I have to go. Using the runtime version isn’t a good option because I’ve got a lot of conditional merge syntax.

Update:

The easiest way to accomplish this is to just open the XML and copy from the of the template to the of the rich text. You don’t need to go through an html encoder, because the html of the template component is already encoded.