Chapter 20. Adding, Editing, and Formatting Text

Somebody once said to me, "Writing isn't so tough: All you have to do is find a quiet spot and open a vein."

That's true, actually, but to the extent that writing a Web page can be made less immediately life threatening , a WYSIWYG editor does just that. The principal job in creating the text of a Web page involves two main tasks : getting the text into the file (by typing it, copying it, or importing it) and assigning paragraph properties to each block of text. The properties tell browsers how to present that text.

In this chapter, you learn how to get text into your Web page files, format it by assigning properties, and edit it. Dealing with the text first is usually the best way to build a Web page; it forces you to think about and resolve issues related to the organization and flow of content.

This chapter assumes that you have already installed Netscape Communicator 4.7 and its built-in Web-authoring program, Composer. If you have not, visit http://wp.netscape.com/download/archive.html and download Netscape Communicator version 4.7 for your system. (It's free.)

More recent versions of Netscape and Composer are available, as well. Although the exact steps for some features may differ slightly, you'll have little difficulty finding your way around a newer version of Composer using the material in this book.