Formatting Paragraph Text

This tutorial illustrates formatting text in Dreamweaver CS5.

In the previous section we saw how to format selected text. In this section we're going to look at how to format a whole paragraph. However, you don't need to select a whole paragraph to format it. Just place the cursor anywhere inside the paragraph and the paragraph formatting operations we're going to apply will apply to the whole paragraph.

We're going to use the text on Page-1.

With the cursor in the first paragraph, press the HTML button on the left in the Properties Panel.

One way of applying a style to a whole paragraph is to use one of the existing styles. You can select from these in the Format box by clicking on the dropdown and selecting.

Here choose Heading2, and the current paragraph (the one with the cursor in it) is reformatted to the style of Heading2.

Note that the paragraph before it (which is actually the title of the article) has a style of Heading1 (HTML tag <h1>), and the paragraph after it has a style of paragraph (HTML tag <p>).

You can also select these styles from the Format menu by clicking on Format Paragraph.

We'll be looking at styles, and in particular the use of CSS, later, but for now we're going to accept the headings that we have.

There are various other formatting operations that we can perform on whole paragraphs.

One important aspect is the paragraph alignment. The paragraph we're working on is left-aligned, i.e. the text is aligned on the left edge but not aligned (it's called ragged) on the right. To change this, use one of the alignment buttons on the CSS page of the Properties Panel. Each of these has a tool tip to tell you which alignment it is, although the icons do that as well.

Note that paragraph alignment always applies to a whole paragraph. Here is the effect if I press Align Center.

And finally for this section, you can specify a text indent or text outdent for a paragraph. With our chosen paragraph returned to paragraph style and to left alignment, click the Blockquote button on the CSS page of the Properties Panel and the paragraph is indented, as you can see here.

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