Working with text in Dreamweaver

Text can be put onto a page in Dreamweaver in a similar way to other text editing programmes such as Word. If you start typing, text will flow from the top left hand side of the page. You can use the following text editing techniques:
• Click to move the insertion point.
• Double click to select a word.
• Drag the I-beam pointer across text to select it.
• Press DELETE to delete to the right, or BACKSPACE to delete to the left.
• Use Edit/Cut, or Edit/Copy and Edit/Paste to cut/copy and paste text.(Ctrl+X, Ctrl+C Ctrl+v)

Paragraphs and Line Breaks

In a web document pressing the ENTER key ends a paragraph, like most word processing programmes. In a web document each paragraph is treated as a unit for formatting, alignment and text flow purposes and paragraphs are separated by a line of blank space. Like so:

If you wish to have a line break without a line of blank space ie if you were typing an address press SHIFT+ENTER.

Add empty space!

Web browsers tend to ignore empty space, so if you try to insert more than one empty space between words Dreamweaver will ignore you. You need to insert a ‘nonbreaking space’ character (the HTML code for a nonbreaking-space character is  ). To do this press: CTRL+SHIFT+SPACEBAR.

Formatting text

You can change the appearance of the text on your web page by changing the font (type size and typeface), colour and formatting, such as bold and italic (character formatting). You can also alter the alignment and indentation of paragraphs (Paragraph formatting). When you enter text in Dreamweaver it will assume its own formatting until you change it the settings are:
• Font – Times Roman (or an equivalent serif font)
• Size – 3 (on a scale of 1-7)
• Colour – Black
• Bold – off
• Italic – off
• Paragraph alignment – left aligned

You can change these settings using ‘Property Inspetor’ which looks like this:

Text sizes can be set using headings (for titles etc)
	Absolute text size is always relative as people looking at your website can change the size that they view text. The default size for text is size 3 which is the same as size 12 in a word processing programme. You can also increase or decrease the size of your text by entering + or – values. If you want a heading that is larger than the maximum size, you will need to create the heading as an image (you can use Corel Draw, Illustrator or similar). To check spelling go to Text/Check Spelling or use Shift/F7. To insert special characters use the insert window and click on the down arrow by the common tab:
and general paragraphs:
		Select characters. For extra characters click on the button. (Bottom right in the block of characters. If you are using a special character several times save time by copying it onto the clipboard so you can paste it in where necessary.

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