formatting text in a content management system

am building some back-end ASP CMS pages for someone - i want them to be able to put their own text in but, so far, despite me typing in line breaks etc, when the dBase serves them, they don thave line breaks/ para's etc.

is there a simple way to force this to be shown, or is there a simple (free!?) program/extension that will allow copy to be inserted and formatted (rather like the formatting toolbar on this site when you post a message) available for DW8?

any pointers appreciated.