If you are outputting as HTML, you'd have to replace carriage return/line feed with a <br /> tag. There's probably a nice railsy way to do it, but I wrote myself a little helper function that does it using gsub! .
On the other hand, if you are capturing the data in a textarea and output it to a textarea, you shouldn't have to do anything.
DISCLAIMER: I haven't been up very long this morning, so I might not be thinking clearly.