Subtitles of the Movie

For each page that you create in Dreamweaver, you can specify layout and formatting properties using the Page Properties dialog box. This is fairly important dialog that I use, probably on every single page that I create in Dreamweaver, so let me spend some time in this movie reviewing some of the important details of this dialog box. Access the Page Properties dialog by choosing from the main menu Modify, Page Properties; it's the first one in the list, and that'll bring up the Page Properties dialog here. This dialog lets you specify the default font family and font size, background color, margins, links, styles, and many other aspects of page design. You can assign new page properties for each new page you create or modify those for existing pages. By default, Dreamweaver will format text using, cascading style sheets. You can change the page format in preferences to HTML formatting using the Preferences dialog box under Edit Preferences. When using CSS Page Properties, CSS tags are used for all properties to find in the Appearance, Links, and Headings categories of the Page Property dialog box here. Now the CSS tags defining these attributes will be embedded in the head section of the document. Now if you're like me, I mostly use External Style Sheets to format all my pages, that way all the pages on the site will have consistent styling. But there still are cases where you may want to apply individual CSS styling to an individual document. So let me go through some of the more important of these settings that you'll most commonly use when setting up your Dreamweaver documents. For example, I almost always, in the left, right, top and bottom margins; place a zero there in all the text boxes. That will snug the page content up into the left of the document. Notice that if I put zeros there, this space that you can see to the top of this table and to the left of the table will disappear and it snugs right up there to the top. So that's one that I almost always use. Now if I want to have a little bit of space between the left edge of the browser or the top edge of the browser, I can specify those spaces with pixel precision here, so let's set my left margin to five and my top margin to five and apply that. And what you'll notice is that I'll get a five pixel buffer zone there separating the left and top edges of the browser from my table. The Page Properties dialog is where I also usually set my background images or background colors of my documents. For example, there's a green color that I've applied. There's a yellow color that I've applied that matches my table so the table composites well against the page. You can also set your background images by browsing for an image to use as your background. You've also got a Repeat setting for how you want that image to repeat, no repeat, to repeat randomly, or to repeat only in the X dimension or the Y dimension. If you use both a background image and a background color, the color appears while the image downloads, and then the image covers up the color after it's finished downloading. If the background image contains any transparent pixels, the background color will show through. Now another category that I typically use with all my pages is the Title and Coding here, very important to set up a page title. So we'll call this Page Properties dialog, which is the topic of this movie. The document type right here specifies a document type definition. For example, you can make an HTML document X HTML compliant by selecting XHTML 1.0 transitional, or XHTML 1.0 Strict from the pop-up menu here. Document encoding specifies the encoding used for characters in the document with the options being Unicode, Arabic, Basic, Central European, Hebrew; I mean, there's a lot of them here. Probably the most common is Western or Unicode UTF8, which is the default. Most of the other settings here are useful, but I typically set up my links and headings in an external style sheet, so that for example, Heading 1, Heading 2, and Heading 3 are the same in all the documents of my website. If I set them up here, for example, in this document, I have a Heading 1= 14, and then I open up another document and I forget what Heading 1 was in my previous document and set it to Heading 16, then my headings will not be consistent from page to page in my site. So for that reason and several others, I typically leave my headings and my links settings here to my external cascading style sheet document, which I'll be covering much later in this tutorial. And so that will conclude this section of the course on the Dreamweaver workspace. In this section, you've viewed movies on workspace layouts, Dreamweaver view options, how to use the Insert Menu. You've learned all about the Properties Inspector and about panels and panel groups. You've learned the various zoom tools for zooming in and out of a document, the guide tools, and in this movie, the section of the tutorial wrapped up with the discussion on the Page Properties dialog.