Sorry that this reply is so delayed Randolph. I wasn't checking the thread anymore. I was hesitant to even reply this late, but decided it may help others if not you.
- Trusted user status didn't help in the Moodle "Book" resource editor or in the forum editor. I ended up creating html files offline, uploading the files to Moodle and linking to the files through the Moodle "Web Page" resource. It seems to work fine with all the html tags I was using, especially <pre>.
- Since then I've discovered an even better solution though!
I was looking at the html "source" on another web site and notice they were using a tag I'd never encountered before:
<code>
.
.
</code>
It seems to work just like the <pre> tag does, preserving white space and automatically using a monospaced font (appears to be Courier). This was all I was looking for with the <pre> tag so the <code> tag is a perfect solution for me.
Unfortunately it doesn't seem to work here though, getting striped out when I tried to demo it on this text. C'est la vie!
Hope this helps all you other programming instructors out there who are not html experts, as well as anyone else unable to use the <pre> tag in a similar manner.