Setting a character with imagesource through htmlText?

[Geoff Canyon]

If you set the text of a field to "test" and then set the imagesource 
of char 3 of that field to 20, you'll see "te" followed by a beachball 
followed by "t"

If you put that field, you'll get "test"

If you put the htmlText of the field, you'll get:

<p>te<img src="20">t</p>

Note the absence of the character "s"

If you set the htmlText of the field to the htmlText of the field, 
there will be no visible change. But if you put the field, you'll now 
get "te t" with a space where the "s" used to be.

Question 1: is this a bug? I think so. I don't see this in bugzilla, so 
if consensus is that this is a bug I'll enter it.

Question 2: any ideas for a workaround? Setting the htmlText of a field 
is dramatically faster than putting text into it and then setting the 
imageSource of each character individually, but it can be very handy to 
have a character hidden within an image, since it can be a quick 
reference to what the image is.

regards,

Geoff Canyon
gcanyon at inspiredlogic.com