WYSIWYG editors make life easier for end users, and that's a good thing.

They also can generate awful markup, and facilitate terrible design choices, and that's a bad thing (no, you really don't need that font to be 48pt, and red).

Current best practice suggests using the WYSIWYG API. However, there are other options to consider, such as the Aloha Editor.

The following steps can help guide you as you configure your text editor; this post provides a plethora of detail and background for people looking for more.

The short version:

• Enable the WYSIWYG module and the Libraries module - admin/modules
• Configure the WYSIWYG module at admin/config/content/wysiwyg - this will involve two steps.
• For the first step, you need to select an editor to install. The instructions for installing individual editors is included in the Installation section. For this demo, we are using the CK Editor.
  
  NOTE: the Libraries module simplifies the process of using third party libraries, like a text editor.
• Once the editor has been installed, you can configure the editor for each input format.
  
• As part of the WYSIWYG config options, you can enable buttons to display for your editor. In general, less is more, and you also need to make sure that the buttons you enable align with the html tags that are allowed via the input formats.