Drag Text type text formatting

The text entry box for creating the Drag Text activity is not rich text. I imagine this is because there is some regex magic happening in the background.  I'm hoping to add very simple formatting to the paragraph into which the tiles are dropped. Really all I want to do it italicise a few of the words (words in the pragraph, not words in the dragable tiles).  Is there already a way add simple formatting? How difficult would it be to add something like /text/ to create simple html tags like <em>text</em>?

Thanks!