Posted by lsiden on February 28, 2011 at 11:32pm
I thought there was a way to configure particular form items (usually textareas) to use a particular input filter by default that may be different than the global default set in /admin/settings/filters. Does anyone remember that or am I imagining things in my coding delirium?

Comments
Answered my own question
The way that worked for me is to use hook_form_alter(). The format option will be in $form[$field_name]['format'].
If it's a hand-crafted form,
If it's a hand-crafted form, you don't need a hook_form_alter, since you can just set the format flag manually. For CCK fields, you can allow input filter by selecting Filtered text (user selects input format) under Text processing.
Now, if you need to force an input that's different from the default, you're looking at the Better Formats module.