Macromedia Studio 8 [Electronic resources] : Training from the Source نسخه متنی

Inserting Placeholder Text

During the design phase of a Web project, it's often helpful to work with placeholder content rather than actual content. Your goal during the design phase is not to worry about the message of the content, but rather to decide how you want to format the assets and text you import before you begin working on them.

One technique designers use for placeholder text is the fake Latin

Lorem Ipsum text. This text is nonsense, and yet it looks enough like regular English to be a serviceable stand-in for real content. Dreamweaver lacks a tool that enables you to pour in a specified amount of Lorem Ipsum text; however, an extension for Dreamweaver lets you add this functionality. When run from within Dreamweaver, this extension prompts you for the number of characters or paragraphs you need, and dumps in the requested amount of placeholder text at the active insertion point.

Before you can use the Lorem Ipsum Generator extension, you'll have to download and install it using the Macromedia Extension Manager, a program that installs automatically with any Studio 8 product. Most extensions are available at Macromedia's Web site. While many of them are freeware, some require payment to download.

In this task, you'll learn to search for, download, install, and use the Lorem Ipsum Generator extension.

This takes you to the Dreamweaver Exchange page at Macromedia.com.

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Because the Lorem Ipsum extension was not displayed on the Dreamweaver Exchange page, you'll need to search for it.

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When you click the Download icon, the Macromedia Web site will prompt you to either sign in or create a profile before downloading the extension. Follow the onscreen directions to sign in or register.

Save the extension on your Desktop.

When you click the Accept button, the Extension Manager automatically installs the extension into Dreamweaver. When it's finished, a dialog appears, confirming the success of the installation.

The Macromedia Extension Manager indicates that the Lorem Ipsum Generator extension has been successfully installed and that you need to restart Dreamweaver in order for the extension to take effect. It also tells you how to access the new extension you just installed: Insert > Technocurve > Lorem Ipsum.

This time, the new feature will appear in the Insert menu.

You will again use jadevalley_templat218 to insert the Latin text to mock up the page.

You can also select the Lorem Ipsum option from the Common category in the Insert bar.

This command brings up the Lorem Ipsum dialog.

Three paragraphs of Latin words will give you enough text to mock up this page.

This command inserts three paragraphs of dummy text for the page mockup.

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Now that the Lorem Ipsum Generator extension has been successfully added to Dreamweaver, you can use this extension to quickly mock up a page while you're waiting for page content.