You should be able to use CSS to change the style of text in a pre tag.

Normally, of course, tables are The Right Approach. But if you want to quickly take a ton of pre-formatted text reports and throw them up, this is a doable approach.

An even worse trick is to create a table that has each character in its own cell. That allows you to do anything in the way of formatting. The only time that I've seen this done by anyone who was being serious was someone who was trying to create an HTML version of the Bloomberg screens. (It made development much faster to be able to actually see what it would look like without having to send code to Bloomberg. And Bloomberg screens play games with font and background color, so tables made a lot of sense.)

Cheers,
Ben