Dreamweaver CC: The Missing Manual

Chapter 2. Working with Text

Nowadays, streaming video, audio, and high-quality graphics are what draw many people to websites. After all, it’s exciting to hear the latest song from your favorite band, preview a yet-to-be released blockbuster, or watch the kid down the street embarrass himself in front of a billion YouTube viewers.

But while entertainment may grab the Internet spotlight, the Web is woven primarily with words. News, Justin Bieber gossip, and countless personal blogs about cats still drive people to the Internet. As you build web pages and sites, you’ll spend a lot of time adding and formatting text. To get your message across effectively, you need to understand how Dreamweaver works with text. That’s what this chapter is all about—it covers the not-always-simple act of getting text into your Dreamweaver documents. In Chapter 3, you’ll learn how to format that text so it looks professionally designed.

Adding Text in Dreamweaver

In Design view, Dreamweaver works much like a word-processing program. When you create a new document, a blinking cursor appears at the top of the page, ready for you to begin typing. When you finish typing a paragraph, you press Enter (Return) to start a new one. Text, as well as anything else you add to a web page, starts at the top of the page and works its way to the bottom.

If you build websites for clients or as part of a team, your writers likely send their text to you as a word-processing document. You can copy text from that document (or ...