%brandDTD; ] >

# &brandShortName; Preferences

&brandShortName; has several important settings in the Preferences panel. Users can set the preferences depending on their requirements and &brandShortName; will respect the setting everytime the user starts and uses it.

General Settings Fonts New Page Settings Advanced Settings

This section describes the settings in the &brandShortName; preferences panel. If you are not currently viewing the panel, follow these steps:

1. Click on Tools > Preferences file menu (Mozilla menu on Mac OS X) items to open Preferences(Options) panel.
2. Click the &brandShortName; category to view the corresponding settings available for customization.

For information on &brandShortName;'s publishing settings, see Publishing Settings section.

## General Settings

General preferences allow you to specify settings for saving files and for table editing. These settings apply to every document you create.

If you are not already viewing the &brandShortName; general preferences, follow these steps:

1. Open the Edit menu (Mozilla menu on Mac OS X) and choose Preferences.
2. Click the General category on the category sidebar.

### Recent Pages Menu

Maximum number of pages listed: Specify the maximum number of pages that are listed under Recent Pages in the File menu.

### When Saving or Publishing Pages

- Retain original source formatting: This option preserves line breaks and the page's original formatting for the HTML source code. Select this if you want to preserve white space (extra lines, tabs, etc.) that makes the HTML source code more readable. This preference does not affect how your pages appear in a browser window.
- Reformat HTML source: This option reformats the HTML source code to make it more readable, by inserting line breaks and indentation. This preference does not affect how your pages appear in a browser window.
- Save images and other associated files when saving pages: If checked, all images, JavaScript (JS), Cascading Style Sheet (CSS), and other associated files are saved in the same location as the document when the document is saved for the first time or when the document is saved to a new location. If unchecked, only the HTML file is saved.

- For example, when editing a remote page, this setting ensures that all related files associated with the remote page will be saved locally when you save the page to your hard disk.

- Always show Publish dialog when publishing pages: If checked, &brandShortName; always displays the Publish Page dialog box when you click the Publish button or choose Publish from the File menu. If not checked, &brandShortName; only displays the Publish Page dialog box if it needs more information in order to publish the page.

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### Table Editing

Maintain table layout when inserting or deleting cells: Select this if you want &brandShortName; to always preserve the table's layout (that is, keep it in a rectangular shape) by adding cells where needed. If you deselect this option, when you delete one or more cells, &brandShortName; removes the cell border as well, which can result in a table with empty spaces, or an outline that appears irregular due to an uneven number of cells.

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### Cascading Style Sheets(CSS) Editing

Use CSS styles instead of HTML elements and attributes: Enables the use of Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) formatting in your &brandShortName; documents. With this preference enabled, &brandShortName; generates HTML 4.01 formatting with CSS inline styles for elements.

If this preference is not enabled, &brandShortName; generates HTML 4.01 formatting, but does not use CSS styles.

Compared to HTML, HTML with CSS formatting is more portable, more maintainable, and more compatible when viewed with different browsers. If you enable this preference and then edit a document created without CSS, &brandShortName; replaces the edited elements with CSS styles.

If you enable CSS styles, you can choose a text highlight color for selected text using the text highlight color button on the Format toolbar. You can also choose a color background for any element on the page. (These features are not available if this preference is not enabled.)

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### Site Manager

Always open a document in a new tab: Select this if you want to open documents in new tabs when using the Site Manager. If unchecked, double clicking on filenames in the Site Manager will open the files in new windows.

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## Fonts

Fonts displayed in &brandShortName; are either the program defaults or the user can define their own.

### Fonts for

Font family can be defined in the Fonts for: section of &brandShortName; Preferences. To change the default typeface:

1. From the Fonts for drop-down list, choose a character set. For instance, to set default fonts for the Western (Roman) character set, choose Western.
2. Select whether proportional text should be serif (like "Times New Roman") or sans-serif (like "Arial"). Then specify the font size you want for proportional text.
3. Specify the font to use for Serif, Sans-serif, Cursive Fantasy and Monospace font families. You can also change the size for `Monospace` fonts.

You can also choose the Minimum font size you want to display. Setting a minimum font size can be helpful when editing pages with very small fonts which would be hard to read if this option is not set.

You can also specify the display resolution, which is normally 96 dpi. You can set it to one of the predefined options e.g. 72dpi, or 96dpi or you can either set it to System Setting or set it manually using the Other... option.

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## New Page Settings

New page settings allow you to specify settings for colors and background images that apply to every document you create.

If you are not already viewing the New Page Settings, follow these steps:

1. Open the Tools menu (Mozilla menu on Mac OS X) and choose Preferences.
2. Click on the New Page Settings icon on the category sidebar

### Author

Enter your name. This will add your name to the HTML source code for each new page you create. Your name will be added in the <head> section of the web page and will not be visible on the web page.

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### Markup

- Language: Users can select which language to use as default when creating new web documents. Choose from either HTML4.0 or XHTML1.0.
- DTD: Select the DTD to be used as default when creating new web documents. Options of defining the document as Transitional or Strict are available.

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### Default Page Appearance

- Reader's default colors: Select this if you always want your pages to use the color settings from the viewer's browser for text and link elements.
- Use custom colors: Select this if you always want to specify the colors that are applied to text and link elements. Then for each element, select a color by clicking the color button next to each element which will open the color-picker to select the color easily.
- Background image: Type the location and name of an image file, or click Choose File to locate the image file on your hard disk or network.

  Note: Background images are tiled and override background color.

- To change the author name for an individual page: Open the Format menu and choose Page Title and Properties.

  To change the page colors and background image for an individual page: Open the Format menu and choose Page Colors and Background.

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### Internationalization

- Language: Choose the language in which the html documentsupposed to be written in.

- For example if the document is written in Canadian French, selecting "French/Canada[fr-ca]" will indicate the browser that the document is written in Canadian French. And the html source will contain `<html lang="fr-ca">` as an indicator of document language.

- Writing Direction: Choose the direction of writing text depending on the language you are using in your document. This solves the problems of users creating html pages in languages with right-to-left direction, for example, Arabic, Urdu, etc.

- To change the Language specification for an individual page: Open the Format menu and choose Page Title and Properties, and change language in the Internationalization section.

  To change the Writing Direction of an individual page: Open the Format menu and choose Page Title and Properties, and change language in the Internationalization section.

- Character Set: Character sets determine how the bytes that represent the text of your HTML document are translated to readable characters. With this option you can choose the character set you want to use for your web page. By default, the ISO-8859-1 character set is used, but you can use other options like UTF-8, ISO-8859-15, etc or a user defined character set.

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## Advanced Settings

### Connection

This section describes how to use the Proxies preferences panel. If you're not already viewing it, follow these steps:

1. Open the Edit menu (&brandShortName; menu on Mac OS X) and choose Preferences.
2. Under the Advanced category, click Proxies. (If no subcategories are visible, double-click Advanced to expand the list.)

The Proxies preferences panel allows you to set up &brandShortName; to use a proxy:

Before you start: Ask your network administrator if you have a proxy configuration file or for the names and port numbers of the proxy.

- Direct connection to the Internet: Choose this if you don't want to use a proxy.
- Manual proxy configuration: Choose this if you don't have a proxy location (URL).
  - HTTP Proxy, SSL Proxy, FTP Proxy, Gopher Proxy: Type the name or numeric IP address of the proxy server. Type the port in the Ports field.
  - SOCKS Host: Type the name or numeric IP address of the proxy server. Type the port in the Ports field.
    - SOCKS v4, SOCKS v5: When entering a SOCK Host, select "SOCKS v4" or "SOCKS v5," depending on what version of SOCKS is used for the proxy.
  - No Proxy for: Type the domains and/or IP address that you do not want to use a proxy for. Separate each entry with a comma. (Example: .yourcompany.com, .yourcompany.co.nz, 192.168.1.0/24)
- Automatic proxy configuration URL: Choose this if you have a proxy configuration file or URL, then type the configuration URL.

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### Return Key Behaviour

The option "Return in a paragraph always creates new paragraph" defines the behaviour of the return key. Choosing it creates a new paragraph if you hit the "Return" key while typing in a paragraph. Without this option <br> tags are added for carriage returns.

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### Real-time Spellcheck

Checking the option "Underline misspelled words" will enable the real-time spell checker built into &brandShortName; to underline misspelled words, thus giving the user a visual clue to recheck the spellings.

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### Special Characters

This options allow the user to choose which special characters are coded as entities by &brandShortName;. Choose one of the option:

- Only & < > ' and non-breakable whitespace
- The above and Latin-1 letters
- All characters having an entity equivalence in the HTML 4.0 specification
- Use &#..; notation for all non-ASCII characters

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29 March 2005

Copyright © 2004-2005 Contributors to the Nvu Help Documentation Project.