I Need Ideas About Getting Formatting into EPUB

Dear Programmer types (e.g., @manton (although you shouldn’t reply–you have enough with answering micro.blog questions), @mtt, @amerpie, who am I missing…): I need some help. Here is what I’m trying to do. I use a nearby academic library to get many books for my research. Many of them have very small print for my aged eyes, so I bought a CZUR scanner and I scan them and convert them to epub to read on my tablet. It mostly works very well. However, when I export the scanned document as txt, all of the formatting is stripped out, which is particularly troublesome for things like footnotes, sections headings, etc. I’m trying to figure out if there is a way to convert a document to epub and maintain the formatting.

The export options I have from the CZUR are: Word, pdf, searchable pdf, TIFF, txt.

I’ve tried formatting in .md and then converting to .epub, but what I get is markdown syntax **word** rather than the formatting. If I buy the ebook, the formatting is there, so it must be possible. (So why don’t I buy an ebook version? Because academic publishers are pirates who charge exhorbitant amounts for their books and I’m on a fixed income.)

Any suggestions?