plugin custom tags and editing text

Hi, this is hard to explain ... I made several custom toolbar buttons that generate custom tags in my CKEditor. For example, button 4 inserts these tags <lgl> selected text included </lgl>. This works great and I am able to save the text into MySQl with PHP no problem. I can see the text in the DB field with the correct custom tags in there as well.

BUT

When I go to draw out the text for editing purposes and try to show it in a text area the custom tags are not shown. When I turn on source mode I can see them, but in "regular" default mode I cannot see them ... a similar thing happens with true html tag pairs like strong. If I have text that is marked bold then the text is actually darker (bold) and if I turn on source mode I can see the strong tags.

so my question is ... how do I make the CKEditor open in source mode so that I don't have to click that button each time to see the underlying tags?

I have searched through the docs and the forms and could not find anything to tell me how to start the editor in source mode.

please help.

Petermac