rich text editing

hello all i have a text box as part of a form. the form submits to a mysql db. the text box holds a user's essay question, which is then stored in the mysql db as data type 'text'. i use <? echo str_replace("\\", "", $essay2); ?> when echoing the essay in html, and code such as $essay2=nl2br($essay2); $essay2 = str_replace( "<br />", "\par", $essay2 ); $output = str_replace( "<<essay2>>", $essay2, $output ); to preserve line breaks when generating rtf documents from the text blob essays we have in the mysql db. this is working fine. i have recently had some requests that we add the ability to preserve rich text formatting such as bold, underline and italics to the essay question text box. apparently, the mysql data type 'text' doesn't store rich text formatting such as bold and underline. specifically, i've seen some really nice javascript(?) rich text editors in some high end web based email clients - it would be great to duplicate this type of functionality in our app, as some people would really like to preserve italics and the like in their essays. i was wondering if anyone has had experience with coding rich text text editors, or similar experience. if you have any advice for me, i'd really appreciate hearing from you thanks again redmond -- FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE-p2 FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE-p2 #0: Mon Aug 11 13:00:11 CDT 2003 2:45PM up 6 days, 14:29, 2 users, load averages: 0.14, 0.10, 0.12 There is a great discovery still to be made in Literature: that of paying literary men by the quantity they do NOT write.