Encoding documents in Dreamweaver

Document encoding specifies the encoding used for characters in a document. Document encoding is specified in a meta tag in the head of the document. Document encoding tells the browser and Dreamweaver how the document should be decoded and what fonts should be used to display the decoded text.

For example, if you specify Western European (Latin1), the following meta tag is inserted:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">.

Dreamweaver displays the document using the fonts that you specify in Fonts Preferences for the Western European (Latin1) encoding. A browser displays the document using the fonts the browser user specifies for the Western European (Latin1) encoding.

If you specify Japanese (Shift JIS), the following meta tag is inserted:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=Shift_JIS">.

Dreamweaver displays the document using the fonts that you specify for the Japanese encoding. Browsers display the document using the fonts that the browser user specifies for the Japanese encodings.

You can change document encoding for a page and change the default encoding that Dreamweaver uses to create new documents, including the fonts used to display each encoding.