Formatting Text

You format text in Dreamweaver much like you would in a standard word processor. The Property Inspector provides familiar tools for specifying font, color, size, and paragraph format for selected text. Simply highlight any text in your document and select the properties you want.

For example:

1. In any blank area of your page, type Welcome to my first Dreamweaver site. When you've finished, highlight the sentence with your mouse.
2. In the Property Inspector, select Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif from the Font drop-down menu.

The first font in the set (Verdana) is the one the browser will attempt to display. If the font is unavailable, the browser will attempt to display the next font in the set (Arial), and so on. Selecting a font set instead of a single font helps to ensure that the appearance of your text is consistent among all viewers, and that your text appears as you intended it to.

3. Select 10 from the Size drop-down menu.
4. Click the gray box to the right of the Size field. This opens the color menu. Choose a dark gray color to apply to the text.
5. Now, deselect the sentence. Highlight the word Dreamweaver and click the B (Bold) button in the Property Inspector.
6. Finally, place your cursor at the beginning of the sentence and press Enter to create a new line. On the new line, type Greetings!
7. Highlight the word Greetings! and in the Property Inspector select Heading 1 from the Format drop-down menu.

The Format menu contains pre-built styles that let you apply a set of formatting choices to text. Later in the tutorial, you'll learn how to modify the appearance of these styles. When you modify a style, all the text on your page that uses that style is automatically updated with the new formatting.

Notice that as you apply text formatting, Dreamweaver displays the HTML tags it inserts on the status bar. You can quickly unapply formatting by selecting a tag and pressing the Delete button on your keyboard.