Dreamweaver for editing ePub CSS and XHTML files

On page 96 of Elizabeth Castro's EPUB book she recommends several ways to edit the "internal" (my word) files of an ePub. The type of program you need is a text editor of some sorts, and all the better if it can handle GREP.

The options offered to me as a Mac user are TextEdit (free, comes as part of Mac OS; equivalent of Notepad on Windows), BBEdit (a program that needs to be downloaded) and TextMate (again, needs to be downloaded). She also adds not to use MS Word because it will mess up your code.

I would like to add – and this may ultimately turn out to be why my ePubs aren't coming out the other side of unzip–edit–rezip unscathed, time will tell – trusty old Dreamweaver.

Because I own Indesign as part of Adobe Creative Suite, I also have Dreamweaver, a program I have used for years to build my websites. It occurred to me that, hmm, to edit CSS and XHTML, I have been doing this in DW for years. Why not use it!?

As far as I can tell, it works really well – but again, could end up being the source of my problems – given that I can open all of my .opf, .css and .xhtml files in one go. When I edit and save my CSS file I click on an XHTML tab and see the resulting changes instantly in both layout and source modes.

This would be my best tip for editing, if you have DW at hand. I will be talking more about how I went about this in later posts.

PS. if you can think of a reason why DW might be the source of my problems please do post a comment below.