XSL and "discontinuous" tags

I have an XML file that is somewhat unprofessional in design, because it
does this (essentially)

<quoteBegin/> this is a quote
<p> with a paragraph inside </p>
<p> and another, but the quote ends here <quoteEnd/> </p>

I want to replace in the output the quoteBegin with a <font> tag, and
the <quoteEnd> with a closing font tag (this is rendering to old HTML,
so I am going to ignore, for the moment, the mal-formattedness of this
in XHTML). However, the XSL parser won't let me do this "End tag 'font'
does not match the start tag...". Is there a way around this in XSL?

(BTW: I would like to clean up this XML file, which is rather large,
programmatically using XSL and PHP, so that it is compliant with XHTML,
doing something like a "quote continue" inside each <p> tag that it is
continued in, but I still need XSL to be able to output disconnected
tags to help in that endeavor)


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