Once you've decided how you want your code to look, set defaults to control the formatting of HTML created by Dreamweaver. Open Dreamweaver and choose Edit > Preferences > Source Format. Select the first Indent box (labeled Use) if you want your content to be indented, like this:

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Select either spaces or tabs for your indents and assign a size for each (the example above uses spaces and an indent size of 4). If you select tabs, Dreamweaver will accomplish as much of the indenting as it can with tabs and the rest with spaces. For example, if you set an indent size of 12 and a tab size of 8 and select Use and Tabs, Dreamweaver inserts one tab and four spaces for each indented line.

Next, decide whether you want to indent table rows and columns, and frames and framesets. You must select the Use option for these options to work.

If you want your source to wrap automatically, select the Auto Wrap option and set the column after which the wrapping should occur (76 is the default). Selecting Auto Wrap is highly recommended because this option prevents each paragraph from appearing as one long line when you view the source in a browser.

The Source Format preferences also let you choose whether tags and attributes appear in uppercase or lowercase. You can set each of these preferences separately.

All the preferences you've set so far affect only HTML that you create in Dreamweaver. The last two Source Format options, however, let you override the case of imported HTML to your settings, and selectively override only tags or only attributes. For example, if you import a document with all HTML tags and attributes rendered in uppercase, and your settings were to override only attributes to lowercase, the imported HTML would look something like this:

<A href="link.html"><IMG src="image.gif" width="32" height="32" alt="an image"></A>