Adding a Text Area

It's possible that you want your visitors to enter more than just a single line of textmaybe they have a lot to say, or you just want to have a free-form area in which to enter their comments. If that's the case, you'll want to use a text area.

To add a text area:

1.

Choose where in your form you want your text area to appear, and click the text area button on the Insert Bar. The new text area will appear on your page ( Figure 10.8 ). Figure 10.8. A text area lets your visitors enter multiple lines of text, and will scroll when necessary.

2.

If the text area hasn't been automatically selected, select it, and you'll see the options you can change for your new field in the Property Inspector ( Figure 10.9 ). From there, you can change the same values that you could for text fields, with some small differences: Num Lines: This is the number of lines that you want the field to take up on the page. If you only want a single line, use a text field instead. Wrap: The choices here are default , wrap , logical , and physical . Stick with default, as the other options don't work cross-browser and cross-version. Figure 10.9. Use the Property Inspector to set the dimensions and initial value of the text area.

Tip

• Just a reminder: the difference between check boxes and radio buttons is that for a group of radio buttons , only a single option can be picked. When you have a group of check boxes, however, each check box has no relationship to the other check boxes, so you can select multiple check boxes.