Dreamweaver CS6: The Missing Manual

Format Menu

The commands in this menu let you format and modify a document’s text:

• Indent. In the case of bulleted or numbered lists, this option indents the selected list items to create a nested (indented) list (see Nested Lists). For other HTML tags, this option wraps the element in a <blockquote> tag (an HTML tag used to represent a quotation). In cases where it’s against the rules of HTML to wrap the selected tag in a <blockquote>—an HTML table, for example—this option simply inserts an empty <blockquote> tag (really, though, a better approach to indenting text is to use the CSS Margin property, as described on Understanding the Box Model).

• Outdent. Turns selected bulleted or numbered list items into paragraph tags; for nested list items, it removes the indent. If your cursor’s within a <blockquote> tag, this option removes the blockquote.

• Paragraph Format. Applies a paragraph format, such as Heading 1, Heading 2, or preformatted text, to all the text in the current block-level element. You can also go to this menu’s submenu and choose “None” to remove the paragraph formatting.

• Align. Aligns text in the selected paragraph to the left margin, center, or right margin of a document. If the paragraph sits inside a table cell or layer, Dreamweaver aligns it with the left, center, or right of that cell or layer (the CSS text-align property [Changing the Font Size] is a better option).

• List. Turns the selected paragraph into an ordered, unordered, or definition list. You can edit the list’s ...