fiveofsix Yes, it’s possible to have the stage view reflect formatting. OpenLP has an API to service the stage view. If you have an item displayed live, you can take a look at http://localhost:4316/api/controller/live/text and see that for every slide there is one entry "text" with just the plain text and one entry "html" with all the formatting included.
So, what you have to do is open the file stage.js and replace every instance of "text" (including the quotes!) with "html". In my case it found six instances.
Thanks. Couldn't view the api link to you gave, but the find/replace trick worked well anyway. Shame the distinction between bold and not isn't more noticeable, maybe I'll be able to play with the font and background colours.
Your help is much appreciated.