My clients can enter text into textarea and have the option to use the markdown or textile filters for each textarea. 

With some models (articles, newsletter, etc) they can upload images to associate with the model, which are displayed in a column next to the text of the text. 

This worked fine for a while, but they have now told me that the want the ability to put the images INSIDE the text a specific positions. 

What is the best way to go about this? I suppose I may have to use a wysiwyg for this, but would rather not. And how would this work for images which are not yet on the server, etc?