Using .htaccess to clean up paginated URL's?

Hi All,

Quite some time ago I raised a feature request against the Paging project to see if they could clean up paginated URL's. I was told this could be done using .htaccess rewrite rules and for what ever reason I put this idea on the back burner and stuck with massive single page articles.

I am now at this bridge again, and really want to get it nailed this time as I have several articles that should be a half a dozen or more pages long and I am loading them in all in one page which is effecting site performance. Could any of you Mod_Rewrite geniuses out there please lend a hand with this? For instance, this might be the link to my multi page article;

http://mydomain.com/articles/multi_page_article

However, when I start browsing the pages of an article the URL becomes a bit untidy, looking like;

http://mydomain.com/articles/multi_page_article?page=0%2C1

Would it be possible to get it to follow the same URL structure as when viewing comments, such as;

http://mydomain.com/articles/multi_page_article#page_1

Or preferably something like;

http://mydomain.com/articles/multi_page_article/page_1

Thanks for the help!! (I hope ;-) )