Adobe® Dreamweaver® CS4 Bible

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Part VII

Extending Dreamweaver

Recording and replaying commands

I’m a big fan of any kind of work-related automation, and I consider myself a power user of word-

processing macros, so you can imagine my delight when a similar capability was added to Dream-

weaver. You save a tremendous amount of work with the capability to record onscreen actions and

then replay them instantly—with the option of saving them as a command or simply pasting them

into another document. Nearly every onscreen action can be replicated.

How could you use such a macro-like capability in Dreamweaver? Suppose you have a series of 10

images on a page, and you want to give each image a vertical space of 10, a horizontal space of 8, and

a 2-pixel border. You could perform each of these actions one at a time, entering in the same border

value and selecting the center alignment button, but it would get rather tedious after the third or

fourth image. With Dreamweaver, you can easily automate the procedure by following these steps:

1. Select the first image.

2. Choose Commands ➪ Start Recording or use the keyboard shortcut, Ctrl+Shift+X

(Command+Shift+X). The cursor changes to a recording tape symbol, indicating you’re in

recording mode.

3. Enter the new values in the Property inspector.

4. Choose Commands ➪ Stop or the same keyboard command again: Ctrl+Shift+X

(Command+Shift+X). The cursor changes back to ...