MS FrontPage —

Selecting and Moving Text

Once you get some text on your page, you'll want to edit it, and FrontPage gives you all the usual tools to cut, copy, and paste text. (If you'll be copying and pasting lots of content from other Microsoft Office programs, see FrontPage and Office for more information.)

Before you can move or format text, first you've got to select it. Selecting or highlighting text tells FrontPage what text you want to modify. FrontPage gives you a variety of ways to select text:

  • To select a word, double-click it.

  • To select a paragraph, triple-click in it.

  • To select any amount of text, drag your cursor over it.

  • Use your keyboard to select any amount of text by pressing Shift and using the four arrow keys (left, right, up, down) to highlight the text you want.

  • Press Ctrl+Shift and press your right or left arrow keys to select a word at a time.

Symbols Display Incorrectly

Your symbol looks fine when you take a look at your site on your Windows computer, but on your friend's Mac, it displays incorrectly. Like a lot of other browser display problems you'll encounter, this quirk stems from FrontPage's Microsoft-centric approach.

Depending on what the character is, FrontPage uses one of three different methods to insert it in your page's HTML code:

  • Where possible, FrontPage inserts the character itself. This method applies to the most common symbolsthose that appear when you first open the Symbol dialog box.

  • The program inserts a numeric code, which you'll find on the bottom of the Symbol dialog box. FrontPage uses the numeric code for symbols beyond the basic setthose with a number code greater than 255.

  • FrontPage inserts a named entity. Because some characters, such as the < (less-than sign) actually signify something within HTML code, telling a browser to display this character can be tricky. You can do it with a special set of characters that serve as a kind of HTML code word for the symbol: a named entity. For instance, the named entity for the less-than sign is <. Predictably, > is the named entity for the > (greater-than sign).

The first two methods work fine on any Windows computer because FrontPage speaks their language. But either one of these methods can cause problems for browsers on non- Microsoft operating systems. The third option saves the day. Any kind of browser can understand named entities. If you're having trouble getting a special character to display correctly, dive into your page's HTML code, locate the symbol, and replace it with the character's named entity. How do you know what the named entity is? Any good reference book or Web site on HTML will include a comprehensive list of named entities. Try searching the World Wide Web Consortium's site at www.w3c.org.

Moving Text

Once you've selected text, you can easily cut, copy, and paste it using the corresponding commands on the Standard toolbar and within the Edit menu. These edit options work just like those in Microsoft Word and other programs. You're probably familiar with them, but you might not be aware of some additional ways to move text.

Drag and drop

You can drag and drop selected text to a new location. To move it, click once within the selected text and drag it to its new home. If you want to duplicate a passage instead of moving it, just hold down the Ctrl key while you drag.

Pasting options

When you're copying content between Web pages or into FrontPage from another program, the formatting can differ wildly between the original setting and the new or "destination" location. Will the new text look terribly out of place? Will you need to reset it all manually to match other text on your page? Or maybe you want to keep the original formatting. FrontPage gives you precise control over formatting and lets you decide what you want to do as soon as you're finished pasting. Whenever you paste text within Design view, the Paste Options icon pictured in Figure appears.

Immediately after you paste text, the Paste Options icon displays just below the last paragraph mark. Click the icon to give FrontPage special pasting instructions.

Once you click the Paste Options icon, a menu appears offering a variety of formatting options for the new text. Depending on what kind of content you've pasted, some or all of the following choices may appear in the menu:

  • Use Destination Styles. Pasted text takes on the formatting of the new document into which you pasted it.

  • Keep Source Formatting. Pasted text retains the formatting it had in the source document (the one from which you cut or copied it).

  • Keep Text Only. This option strips the text of all formatting. For example, a table would lose all its neat columns and rows and you'd be left with just the numbers and text that were inside the table.

When you're pasting content from another Microsoft Office program, like Word, the Keep Text Only selection is your best bet. If you use it, you can avoid polluting your page's code with all the gobbledygook that comes along with Word's formatting. FrontPage's Paste Special menu (explained next) offers similar pared-down pasting options.

Of course, you can also just ignore the Paste Options icon. If you do, FrontPage's standard setting is to keep source formatting.

If you want to paste text but exclude formatting like italics, underlining, or even font size specifications, the Keep Text Only option (explained above) does the job nicely. However, FrontPage offers you a few alternatives. Instead of selecting Edit » Paste, select Edit » Paste Special. You can choose to paste text in one of the following ways:

  • One formatted paragraph. Pastes text in using a monospaced typewriter-like font (see Formatting Paragraphs, later in this tutorial). FrontPage replaces paragraph breaks with line breaks.

  • Formatted paragraphs. Theoretically, this option is the same as the above, except it keeps paragraph breaks. But the paragraph breaks look just like line breaks, so there's really no difference between this and the previous option.

  • Normal paragraphs. Pasted text takes on the document's Normal style (see Formatting Paragraphs, later in this tutorial). FrontPage substitutes paragraph and line breaks with spaces, creating one big paragraph.

  • Normal paragraphs with line breaks. Same as the previous selection, but FrontPage replaces paragraph and line breaks with line breaks.

  • Do not convert. Use this option to paste HTML code into Design view. Do so and FrontPage keeps tags out of site where they belong. Otherwise, the program would paste code directly onto the page as text, and you'd see the HTML right in a browser's window.