Dreamweaver MX: The Missing Manual

Character Formatting

The simple formatting applied by a paragraph format is not much to write home about, much less to advertise on a résumé. Heading 1, for instance, is generally displayed in black and bold using a large Times New Roman font. (Yawn.)

To really make your Web pages stand out, you may want to apply different fonts, colors, sizes, and styles to your text. Unlike paragraph formatting, which applies to an entire HTML paragraph, you can apply character formatting to any selection of text, whether it’s a single word, one sentence, an entire paragraph, or your whole Web page.

In general, you apply character formatting just as you would in a word processor: Select the text (using any of the methods described on page 56) and then apply a format using the Property inspector or Text menu.

The remainder of this chapter describes this approach to text formatting, which is a simple and quick way to add color and variation to the text on a page. However, this method is becoming quickly outdated. Technical organizations like the World Wide Web Consortium recommend against the kind of character-level formatting discussed here, since it relies on old HTML tags like the <font> tag.

But more importantly, professional Web designers—who not only want to keep up with technical trends but also must build functional Web sites that work for and please the vast audience of Web surfers—are steadily moving to the more sophisticated typographic controls offered by Cascading Style Sheets, as discussed ...