How can I get CODE FORMATTING to work?

message from Electrophyte on 19 Jul 2004

I'm having a lot of trouble with code formatting. I've noticed that there are
at least five other threads on this subject, but I have not found any
information within these threads that resolves the problems.

Frankly, I'm a bit ticked off at Macromedia as DW is an expensive piece of
software and code formatting is a problem that has been solved many times over.
I own at least two other software packages that handle it effortlessly. (The
free utility HTML Tidy and the IntelliJ IDEA Java development environment.) And
this is hardly version 1.0 of DW. You'd think they'd have this relatively
rudimentary functionality implemented correctly by now, especially considering
the price they're charging.

Anyway, enough venting.

When I select "Apply source formatting" literally nothing happens. I've tried
changing the formatting parameters and that has no effect. Previously, I had
changed the formatting options, and I also made adjustment to the formatting of
individual tags under "Tag libraries".

No matter how I set "line breaks" and "contents" under tag libraries for,
say, the "p" tag, I still wind up with weirdly, incorrectly indented code.

Also, could the names of the options be any more confusing? What the hell is
the difference between "formatted and indented" and "formatted but not
indented". (Not that it makes any difference which one you pick in terms of
DW's behavior. I'm just curious.) "Formatted" in what sense, if not indented?

Does anyone know of a way to get DW code formatting to work as advertised? Or
at least work in some useful and consistent manner?

Archived message: How can I get CODE FORMATTING to work? (Macromedia Dreamweaver)