Looking at Your Documents from the Web s Perspective

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As you might know, the latest features in Word make the application a viable interface for creating and editing Web pages. Many Web page developers found the Web page capabilities in Word 2000 intriguing but not particularly practical, because Word automatically generated HTML source code that was bloated with lots of extra Word-specific commands. Now, in Word 2002, developers can easily strip out the extra code before sending their pages on line. This makes Word much more appealing as a Web page development tool.

For more information about creating Web pages in Word, see Chapter 31, "Creating Professional Web Sites."

When you create and edit Web pages in Word, you can use the following Web-specific views:

• Web Page Preview displays the current document in your Web browser so that you can see how it will look as a Web page. To preview a document as a Web page, choose File, Web Page Preview. If your Web browser is not running when you choose Web Page Preview, Word starts it automatically. You can return to your document in Word at any time.
• Web Layout view enables you to work on a document while displaying it in Word in a manner that simulates how the document will appear in a Web browser. For example, in Web Layout view, your documents appear as one long page (without page breaks), text and tables wrap to fit the window, and backgrounds are displayed. You should work in Web Layout view when you are creating Web pages or documents that will be viewed on screen. To change to Web Layout view, choose View, Web Layout.

When you're working in Web Layout view, keep in mind that Word offers a few additional configurable options for this view. Namely, you can control whether object anchors and text boundaries are displayed while you work. Object anchors indicate where objects are attached to paragraphs or positioned within tables, and text boundaries are dotted lines that show spacing and cell padding settings within page margins, columns, tables, and objects. To access the Object Anchors and Text Boundaries options, choose Tools, Options and click the View tab; the options are included in the Print And Web Layout Options section. Figure 29-2 shows a sample Web page with the Text Boundaries check box selected. (Notice that the page's graphics links are broken so that you can see the margin and spacing lines more clearly.)