Add HTML style to excerpt

Hi,

I’m trying to find out how to add HTML styling such as bold and italics to a theme which displays excerpts on the home page. Basically I want the excerpt of the post to show a fully coded preview of the post, so the formatting is the same. I tried a plugin, but it didn’t work. I think maybe because the home page code is inside home.php and not index.php ?

I found this bit of code in my theme files (home.php):

<?php the_content_limit(225, “”); ?>

Is there something I can add to this to show HTML formatting?

??