Editing Text

If you've ever used a word processing program (Word, WordPerfect) or a publishing program (Pagemaker, Quark), you'll feel right at home in the Dreamweaver environment.

Dreamweaver uses a WYSIWYG environment for building your web pages. What you see on the screen is pretty much the way your documents will appear when you publish them to the Web.

Let's start with adding some text to your page. Open the "index.html" file you created during the Site Management section of the tutorial, or open a new document and save it as "index.html" before we proceed. Remember that Dreamweaver uses "index.html" as the home page for your site.

When working with text in Dreamweaver, all your text formatting options are conveniently located in the inspector palette. Simply highlight the text you want to edit, and work with formatting options in the palette. Let's take a look at these options:

• Format: Paragraph text is the default option. You can also specify headings and preformatted text in this area.
• Font: If you want to specify a font, use the pull-down menu here. Dreamweaver offers you the choice of several common font combinations, or you can edit your font list to add a specific font or family of fonts.
• Size: This specifies the font size. If you do not select a specific size, the web browser will revert to the default font (font size = 3).
• Color: You can type in a color name, or choose a color from the palette. To access the palette, click the icon.
• Bold and italic text can be selected here.
• Alignment: Left, center, and right-justified are your text alignment options.
• Link: You can type a web address here, or use the pull-down menu to access a list of links used elsewhere in the same document.
• Link Icons: You can also use these icons to either point-and-shoot to your link target or browse for your link target.
• Lists: Clicking these icons will start either a bulleted or a numbered list.
• Indent: Use these icons to either indent or un-indent your text.

As you can see, Dreamweaver makes text formatting easy and intuitive. Go ahead and work at formatting some of the text in your document. Remember to save your document before proceeding.