Storing and displaying pre-formatted text

[eluser]ajknodel[/eluser]
I have a part of my website where I want to have users input some text that can be formatted. When I say formatted I don't mean bold or italic or anything like that. I just mean that when they hit return, I want that return to be saved and displayed in that way. I have a feeling that this is more of a display problem than a storage problem because when I add <pre> tags to the HTML it works (sort of, but it horribly breaks tables - it at least shows that it was stored right).

Is the only way to display this by storing HTML along side the text I want displayed? Is there an easier way? All I'm doing is assigned the query field to a variable and then echo'ing the variable. Is there something else I should be doing?

If I do have to store HTML to format the text, is there a down side to using something like CK Editor? Is it a security risk?