Dreamweaver MX: The Missing Manual

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 word processors. You drag across text to highlight it, or just click where you wish the selection to begin and hold down the Shift key as you click at the end of the selection. You can also use shortcuts like these:

• To select a word, double-click it.

• To select a line of text, move your cursor to the left of the line of text 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, or 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. Ctrl+Shift (-Shift) and the left and right arrow keys select one word at a time.

• Ctrl+A (-A) selects everything in the body of the page—text, graphics, and all.

Once you’ve selected text, you can cut, copy, or delete it. To move text to another part of the Web page, or even to another Dreamweaver document, use the Cut, Copy, and Paste commands in the Edit menu. You can also ...