PDF (adobe.com)

Set default document type and encoding

You can define which document type is used as a default document for a site.

For example, if most pages in your site are of a specific file type (such as Cold Fusion, HTML, or ASP documents), you can set document preferences that automatically create new documents of the specified file type.

  1. Select Edit > Preferences (Windows) or Dreamweaver > Preferences (Macintosh).
    You can also click the Preferences button in the New Document dialog box to set new document preferences when you create a new document.
  2. Click New Document from the category list on the left.
  3. Set or change preferences as necessary, and click OK to save them.
    Default Document
    Select a document type that will be used for pages that you create.

    Default Extension
    Specify the file extension you prefer (.htm or .html) for new HTML pages you create.
    Note: This option is disabled for other file types.

    Default Document Type (DDT)
    Select one of the XHTML document type definitions (DTD) to make new pages XHTML-compliant. For example, you can make an HTML document XHTML-compliant by selecting XHTML 1.0 Transitional or XHTML 1.0 Strict from the menu.

    Default Encoding
    Specify the encoding to be used when a new page is created, as well as when a document is opened that does not specify any encoding.

    If you select Unicode (UTF‑8) as the document encoding, entity encoding is not necessary because UTF‑8 can safely represent all characters. If you select another document encoding, entity encoding may be necessary to represent certain characters. For more information on character entities, see www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/sgml/entities.html.

    If you select Unicode (UTF‑8) as a default encoding, you can include a Byte Order Mark (BOM) in the document by selecting the Include Unicode Signature (BOM) option.

    A BOM is 2-4 bytes at the beginning of a text file that identifies a file as Unicode, as well as the byte order of the following bytes. Because UTF‑8 has no byte order, adding a UTF‑8 BOM is optional. For UTF‑16 and UTF‑32, it is required.

    Unicode Normalization Form
    Select one of these options if you select Unicode (UTF-8) as a default encoding.

    There are four Unicode Normalization Forms. The most important is Normalization Form C because it's the most common one used in the Character Model for the World Wide Web. Adobe provides the other three Unicode Normalization Forms for completeness.

    Show New Document Dialog Box on Control+N
    Deselect this option (“on Command+N” for Macintosh) to automatically create a document of the default document type when you use the key command.

    In Unicode, there are characters that are visually similar but can be stored within the document in different ways. For example, “ë” (e‑umlaut) can be represented as a single character, “e‑umlaut,” or as two characters, “regular Latin e” + “combining umlaut.” A Unicode combining character is one that gets used with the previous character, so the umlaut would appear above the “Latin e.” Both forms result in the same visual typography, but what is saved in the file is different for each form.

    Normalization is the process of making sure all characters that can be saved in different forms are all saved using the same form. That is, all “ë” characters in a document are saved as single “e‑umlaut” or as “e” + “combining umlaut,” and not as both forms in one document.

    For more information on Unicode Normalization and the specific forms that can be used, see the Unicode website at www.unicode.org/reports/tr15.