Need info on editor api calls

I admit it – I’m a complete neophyte at developing wordpress plugins. I’m hoping to just get a pointer in the right direction.

When you switch from the HTML editor to the Visual (tinymce?) editor, any text in any code tags you have put in is actually reformatted – any beginning spaces are removed from the lines within the tags. This is unlike the pre tag behaviour, where nothing is changed.

Since the pre tags are used for quotes for most plugins, I wanted to use the code tags to include Java, Javascript, etc… code examples in my posts. The default behaviour of removing beginning spaces puts a crimp in this plan.

Another default behaviour is evident when putting Java examples with Generics in the pre tags. Java Generics uses greater-than and less-than characters, which are processed somewhere in WordPress and turned into HTML entities. This is also a show stopper.

What I’m looking to do is find where in WordPress actions are applied in the processing of the code tags in a post or page and modify it to be more like the pre tag processing, and force it to leave everything exactly as it was typed, with no post-processing of the contents of the code tags.

If anyone knows if this isn’t possible, it would be nice not to spin my wheels. Otherwise, I’d appreciate any help and info you could provide me that would give me a good start on this.