Netscape Composer Tutorial
Setting Composer Preferences

The Composer Preferences dialog box lets you set various properties that you want to apply to all the documents you create in the Composer. Use the Page Properties dialog when you want settings to pertain only to the current document.

Quick Links:

• Preferences - General
• Preferences - Publish

Composer Preferences - General

• Choose Edit|Preferences and then select Composer in the Category window.

Lets you specify which applications to open when you want to make changes to HTML (advanced users) and image files. You can also indicate a default template file to use for all new documents. Click OK to make the specified changes and close the dialog box.

Author name

The default name used by the editor to indicate who created a document. This information can be helpful to readers who've found your document by using a Web search tool and must now select from a list.

Auto Save

Specify the interval (in minutes) between automatic saves of your document. If you are working on a new document that hasn't been saved, the editor prompts you to save it.

External editors

The path and file name of the text and image editors of your choice. For example, if you want to use Notepad to edit the actual HTML source, type C:\WINDOWS\NOTEPAD.EXE. Choosing HTML Source from the Edit menu starts Notepad with the current document displayed. If you're not sure of the file name, click Browse to find the application. Note: When you edit HTML source using this method, you must save your changes in the source editor and then choose View|Reload to see your changes.

Font Size Mode

Select how Composer will display font sizes:

• relative to the point size of the default Navigator font.
• a relative HTML font scale (between -2 and +4).
• relative to both HTML font scale and absolute point sizes.

Composer Preferences - Publish

To view the Publishing Preferences dialog box, click the plus sign next to the Composer category in the left pane, then select Publishing.

This window lets you specify Composer settings for saving remote documents locally so you can edit them, insert images, and publish files to remote servers. When you're done, click Apply to make the changes you've specified and leave the dialog box open. Click OK to make the changes and close the dialog box.

Maintain links

Makes sure that inserted links are relative to the current document. When saving a document from a remote server to your local disk, this option insures that any links in that document to other files in the same directory are relative when saved locally. These links will work locally if you've also saved the remote files they pointed to. Links to files outside the document's directory are absolute. Unchecking this option means that the link path names are not modified and links local to the saved document may no longer work.

Keep images with page

Saves a copy of the image file in the same location as the document. Since images are not located in the document itself, unchecking this option means that only the HTML document is saved locally, not the image files. Leaving this option checked (recommended) means that a document's images are always kept in the same directory as that document.

Default publishing location

FTP: Enter the default location where you want to upload your web pages using the File Transfer Protocol. For example, the URL in this box might look something like this:

ftp://ftp.chre.vt.edu/topfolder/myfolder/

HTTP: Enter the default location where you want to upload your web pages using the web server protocol (not used for this course). If you are not running your own web server, you may need to contact your Internet service provider to find out what to type here. For example, the URL in this box might look something like this:

http://websurf.com/docs/

If publishing to a FTP site, enter the HTTP address to browse to. Enter the default location of your published web pages. For example, using the FTP example from above, you might type:

http://www.chre.vt.edu/topfolder/myfolder/index.htm

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