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Dreamweaver - HTML and CSS Using Dreamweaver

Adding copy to Dreamweaver

Daniel Walter Scott || VIDEO: 3 of 34

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Contents

Introduction

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Adding text

When you add text to your website you’re likely to bring it in from a word processor like MS Word or copying & pasting from an email. Bringing text in directly this way can cause lots of problems as Dreamweaver will bring though a lot of the styling from Word which can cause problems in your site. To avoid any problems with text it’s best to ‘wash’ the text before bringing it in.

  1. File > Open > Dreamweaver Exercise files > Text > Vintage Homepage.doc
  2. Select all the text and Edit > Copy
  3. Paste the text into Note Pad (PC) or Text Edit (Mac). Then copy this text back out and into Dreamweaver. 
     Note: In Text Edit (Mac), to remove all the formatting you must choose the Format > Make Plain Text.

 




 

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Video transcript

Dreamweaver tutorial 03: How to add text to a webpage.

Hi, Welcome,

My name is Daniel Walter Scott. I am a trainer here at Bring Your Own Laptop. This course is designed for people who are new to dreamweaver and web design. The topic we are covering today is: Adding text to our website.

You will get text that will come from another website, a word document or from an email and you have to copy it in to Dreamweaver. A lot of styling will come along for the ride with that text and cause you a lot of problems in your code for Dreamweaver.

We want to show you how to remove any styling that might get attached to the text before you bring it in to Dreamweaver. As an example, I have a word Document. You can see here someone has gone through and added headings, a hyperlink as well as some other fonts and colour. If I copy it and go back in to Dreamweaver and paste it in, it brings through the Times New Roman with a hyperlink, a table and different fonts. That can cause me a lot of problems, especially when I’m new to this. I don’t know how to remove a lot of that stuff. It’s best to remove all the formatting before you bring it in to Dreamweaver.
Washing your text

So I’m going to go to Edit > Undo and I’m going to do it all again. What I need to do is what they call ‘washing the text’. I need to strip off all the formatting. We are going to do a step here. On a Mac going from Word, we will copy and paste in to ‘Text Edit’ (which is built in to every MAC, you may need to go off and find it). On a PC you will use ‘Notepad’ which is built in to every PC.

So on a MAC I am going to copy the text. ‘Edit’ – ‘Copy’, move in to ‘Text Edit’, make a new document and paste it in here. On a MAC it still brings through all the formatting. So on a MAC I need to do an extra step here. I need to go to ‘Format’ and then ‘Make Plain Text’. Once I press ‘OK’, It just turns it in to a plain text. On a PC once you copy in to ‘Note Pad' it will be nice plain text straight away. So there is one less step in a PC.

So we are now going to ‘Select' 'All’-‘Edit’-‘Copy’- ‘Move to Dreamweaver’, -‘Edit’ - ‘Paste’. You can see it brought through the text but without all the headings and styles and links etc. It’s nice plain text now. This is the best way to move any text. We might be bringing text from an email, word etc, always wash it. It may not look like it’s got any styling in it but it might bring through some!