Document encoding specifies the encoding used for characters in the document. Document encoding is specified in a meta tag in the head of the document; it 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), this meta tag is inserted: <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">. Dreamweaver displays the document using the fonts 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), this meta tag is inserted: <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=Shift_JIS">. Dreamweaver displays the document using the fonts you specify for the Japanese encoding; a browser displays the document using the fonts 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.