Under the tools menu, you will also find page editor options. This is another extensive set of preferences and again, I am not going to show you everything in this dialog but let me point out a few options you might want to change.
Under the general settings, you have some spell check options and if you are like me, you need to spell check your pages. You will also find some options for what kinds of HTML tags were used. If you are not familiar with this, do not worry, the default settings are fine. But if you have a preference here, you can make the change. Code view, similarly has different options for how it is displayed. Under authoring, you can chose whether by default you want to create HTML pages, ASP, CSS, this is handy, for example if you are working on an ASP.net site and all the pages you are going to be creating should end in ASP.x rather than having to make that extra selection, you can change the default under the authoring tab.
By default the doctype is set to XHTML1.0 transitional, that is the doctype settings that most designers are using on the web today. The doctype is a single line of code that appears at the very top of your page and tells browsers which version of HTML you are using. If you are not quite sure what I am talking about, do not worry, you will see a lot more about this as we get deeper in the CSS, but if you know you want to use the different type setting because you are working on a legacy site or for whatever personal use you might have, you can change it in the authoring tab in page editor options.
The secondary scheme is only important if you do not have the doctype specified or if the doctype is malformed. If you do like working in the HTML code, code snippets is a very cool tool. Notice that expression web comes with that doctype settings already saved as a code snippet, so if I wanted to add that to an existing page that did not have the doctype at the top I could use code snippets to do so. Code snippet is also a great place to save code that you might use uniquely on your website and want to reuse over and over. So for example, if there is a special ad tag or some other feature of your site that you can only do by typing in the code, you can save it as a code snippet and be able to enter it automatically, so you do not have to retype it over and over. The ruler and grid options that you specify lay out controls, by default the ruler set the pixels because most of us who do web designs think of things in pixels but if you are more comfortable in inches or centimeters, you can always change it. The grid settings provide a grid over the top of your design area. Here you can specify the spacing of that grid and the thickness of the line. You can also get more precise with the snap o grid feature. Under font families, you can add collections of fonts.
To understand why you might want to add a new collection of fonts, you need to first understand how fonts worked on a world-wide web. Think of it this way, in order for text, that has been styled in a particular font like Arial, to display an Arial on the computer of your user, your user has to have the Arial font on their computer. This only applies to text, any font you use in an image get saved in the image and will always be displayed on that font. But if you are styling text, your visitor has to have the same font that you use and because not everybody in the world has the same fonts, web designers create and apply collections of fonts and browsers are set up to interpret multiple levels of fonts. So for example, if I choose the Arial or Helvetica option, when I format text and my user does not have the Arial font then the text will display in Helvetica. If they do not have Helvetica either then the browser will look for the next best San Serif font, meaning a font with many of those little extra curly cues like you have in the Times font.
If you want to use a relatively obscure font, it is a good idea to create a font family and specify a second font and even a third font that are more common. You can easily do that by adding font families in this dialog. Simply select the font that you want from your hard drive. Make sure you have the new font family options selected and choose add. To add a second font as an option, select another font, in this case a good match to Garamond might be Times, at least that is the common one, I know my users likely to have. With Garamond selected, if I choose add; now you see how they string along and I can start to create my own font families.
In contrast, the default font settings that you specify what characters that you might use within the program and the default fonts that will be generated in design view and code view. The color coding and code formatting options are both specific to the display of HTML code. If you like working on the code, you can change it to look almost anyway you like. If you prefer design view, you do not have to worry about these options at all. Other thumbnail lets you specify how you want thumbnails that are automatically generated to appear. In the CSS settings let you get very specific about how and where styles are created and inserted into your pages.
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