I assume nobody has a clue?

 

As of now, I'm just getting the value of Editor1.Text, doing an htmlencode on it and appending the <font style etc etc etc> myself to make a new string.  Then I just re-set Editor1.Text to that new updated string.  This is of course sticking the whole editor inside an AJAX updatepanel.  The highlighting of the text occurs in the vb codebehind aka it makes a trip to the server.  Then, when the event is fired to de-highlight some text, I just manually remove that <font style> tag around that target word and re-set the new string into the editor.

 

I don't know if the aforementioned is the "ghetto" and unsophisticated way of doing this, which is why I asked if there was a more logical and better way to implement this.