>  I would like to avoid an empty <chapter> tag
If you use a node set in a boolean context (eg xsl:if test attriubute)
then it counts as true if it is non empty and false if it is empty
so if you'd been testing against a node set from the source document
you would only need to go

<xsl:if test="p[@stylename='heading 1,Part']">

but you want to test against a result tree fragment generated by
applying templates.

rtf can only be compared as strings so:

<xsl:variable name="a"><xsl:apply-templates select="p[@stylename='heading
1,Part']" /></xsl:variable>
<xsl:if test="$a != ''">

David

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