Formatting Text
Some of the formatting features are fairly obvious whilst others are more complex or difficult to find. You need to have the Property Inspector open whilst formatting text.
Most of these and some others can be found in the Text menu, including a spell checker and the ability to pick and use pre-formatted CSS styles (see CSS section)
Page Properties Command
A number of features can be set up once at the start
of making the page.
Go to Modify menu and select Page Properties
Have a look at the the Page Properties diagram
- Tracing Image is a whole page image which can be used as an aid to page layout. The diagram shows a background layout used to make up the page. - this could be an alternative to use of templates. You need a image capture facility and to save the file as a gif or jpeg.
- Page title is useful when you are using the site on the web so you can bookmark the page meaningfully.
- You can set up all the colours used for hyperlinks
- You can set up the page dimensions and the margin widths
- Have a look at document encoding - you won't want to alter it!
Pasting Text from Files
You don't have to write the text in Dreamweaver.
You can prepare it in a word processor and then paste it into your file
Copy the text into the clipboard from the word processor.
Put your insertion point where you want the text to go and select PASTE
from the Edit menu. You can either paste into the code or directly
onto the page. (there is no insert for text in the Insert menu.
Using Paragraph and Break Tags
By default Dreamweaver places 2 carriage return
afer the text if you press Enter at the end of a line of text. This inserts
the HTML tag <P> </P> into the code and your entry point jumps
down 2 lines.
If you start new line with Shift/Enter it only inserts one carriage return.
This inserts the HTML tag <BR> into your code.
Text Formatting in the Property Inspector
You can format text after creation by highlighting
it and the applying formatting to it.
You can use the Paragraph and Heading Styles selection
box.
- None removes any formatting
- Paragraph applies paragraph tags to selection
- Heading 1 to Heading 6 applies heading styles (1 is largest & 6 smallest)
- Preformatted displays in a fixed non-proportional font (Courier10)
You can also select text size from the Font
Size selection box (1 is smallest
and 7 largest). 3 is default.
+1 to +7 increases existing font size incrementally.
-1 to -7 decreases font size incrementally.
There is no way to set font size in points or pixels in HTML.
Text Formatting in CSS Style Selector Panel
(Open CSS Panel and select New CSS Style button)
If you set a CSS style for the page in CSS Style Selector panel you can set your text in a more recognisable set of units and different range of sizes. - see diagram below
