Character at a time in bash

I was goofing around with fixing html generate from W4W. I could have use perl or a hundred other things, but I wanted see if I could do in bash, for no particular reason. Here it is.

#! /bin/bash

# this script converts an html file so that all markup ('<'...'>')
# occurs on a line by itself with no embedded newlines.  all other
# characters are simply echoed.  all this requires forcing bash
# to read one character at a time.

in=false
IFS=

while true
do
    if read -n 1 c
    then
        # if newline, and we're inside of '<'...'>', just
        # echo a space.  otherwise echo a newline
        if [[ $c == '' ]]       
        then
            if $in
            then
                # if we're in '<...>', echo just a space
                echo -n ' '     
            else
                echo
            fi
        else
            # if '<', note it, echo a newline and '<'
            # else if '>', make it, and echo '>'
            # else echo character
            if [[ $c == '<' ]]
            then
                in=true
                echo
                echo -n "$c"
            elif [[ $c == '>' ]]
            then
                in=false
                echo "$c"
            else
                echo -n "$c"
            fi
        fi
    else
        break
    fi
done