Selecting Text

After you get text into your Dreamweaver document, you’ll undoubtedly need to edit it. You’ll delete words and paragraphs, move sentences around, add words, and fix typos.

The first step in any of these procedures is learning how to select text, which works much as it does in a word processor. You drag your cursor across text to highlight it, or click at the beginning of the selection, and then hold down the Shift key as you click at the end of the selection; you’ll automatically select everything in between. You can also use shortcuts like these:

  • To select a word, double-click it.

  • To select a paragraph, triple-click anywhere in it.

  • To select a line of text, move your cursor to the left of the line until the cursor changes from an I-beam to an arrow, signaling that you’ve reached the left-margin selection strip. Click once to highlight one line of text; click once, and then drag vertically in this selection strip to select multiple lines.

  • While pressing Shift, use the left and right arrow keys to select one letter at a time. Use Ctrl+Shift (⌘-Shift) and the left and right arrow keys to select one word at a time.

  • Ctrl+A (⌘-A) selects everything in the body of a page—text, graphics, and all. (Well, this isn’t 100 percent true: If you use tables or <div> tags [Float Layout Basics] to organize a page, Ctrl+A may select just the text within a table cell or <div> tag; clicking the <body> tag in the Tag Selector [The Insert Panel] is the sure-fire way to select everything on a ...

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