Yeah That is the plan. I got this as a side job for a friend and I don’t want to destroy the actual site with the update before testing on my server to see if the site can stand it.
Found it! Plugins can be hard to locate but when you do they are usually just what you needed.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/page-links-to/
If I understand you correctly, I’m having the same problem. P tags disappear as well as all capital letters. The only way I was able to get spaces between paragraphs was to use a list tag to make an empty list.
My Page