PhpWord generates paragraph breaks in addhtml

I am using PHPWord from within PHP to generate a word docment. I do use addHtml to transform some Mysql text containing multiple lines into a Word paragraph.

My input text contains:

<pre>
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, 
&lt;span style="font_weight:bold"&gt;consectetur adipiscing elit.&lt;/span&gt;
Quisque pretium mi a risus interdum, eu mollis nulla viverra. 
</pre>

Each line is separated with a carriage return (n). I tried to process the lines one by one (adding a n for each line, or use the complete text, result is the same.
Whatever I use (nl2br or str_replace) to transform the n into &lt;br /&gt; before handling addHtml generates:

Meaning a double paragraph separator instead of a single line separator.

How can this be solved? Or is this a known issue?