Great Free Text Editor

When you are developing a website if you need lots of text the best thing you can do is to create PDF documents and link them to your pages. Sometimes, though, you need to include lots of text on web pages. Typing text in Dreamweaver is slow and cumbersome. It is much better to type your documents in another program and paste them into your web pages. You can type text in Microsoft Word and import it into Dreamweaver and have Dreamweaver strip out all the unnecessary Word formatting, but this sometimes messes up your text.

A much better solution is to type your text into a text editor, save it as a text file, and paste it into your web page, using the Paste Special command and keeping your basic formatting and line breaks. I have used EditPad Pro for years, but I have just found a free text editor that is better. It is Notepad++. It is more like typing in a word processor than EditPad Pro and is also a great editor for writing code. It is best to use very little formatting when typing text for a web page. I would not do anything beyond perhaps typing bulleted lists. You should use CSS to style all your paragraph headings, headlines, etc.

I am taking a course at Lynda.com on CSS. The author recommends Notepad++ for the PC and BB Edit for the Mac. You can download Notepad++ at this site: http://notepad-plus-plus.org/ .