find out the tags for what you want to do (eg <b></b> for bold) then set up a button so that it runs a js function:
document.form.field.value = document.form.field.value + '<b>'
which will give you the content of the textarea plus the opening bold tag. you'd need to have some way to tell whether the tag is open or not, so you know whether to close or open it. There's probably some nice clean way to do this, but the simplest way i can think of is to have a hidden field (name="boldtag") that your js function sets the value of to either open or close... something like:
function boldtags(){
if (document.form.boldtag.value == 'open'){
document.form.boldtag.value = 'closed'
document.form.textarea1.value = document.form.textarea1.value + '</b>'
}else{
document.form.boldtag.value = 'open'
document.form.textarea1.value = document.form.textarea1.value + '<b>'
}}
on the downside, you have to have a function for each type of change that you want to make.
then there's the fact that that function's only theoretical, and i've never used it...
