Of all the things I hate…hate…loath…not being able to make a post look like I want it to rates pretty high. For example, if I want to write dialogue in this post, I cannot indent my paragraphs. I have to settle for block paragraphs, which to my teacher/writer sensibilities is anathema. This is not a frackin’ business document. I also very much dislike having my paragraphs automatically double spaced when hitting enter. I loath not being able to change the size, color or style of my font with a simple key stroke. How hard is it to have a blog function similarly to a word-processor document? I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that my Wordpad is more robust than this mockery. Block dialogue looks simply amateur and colloquial.
I transferred over my posts from Blogger, but the fonts are all over the place, colors are off, indenting is gone, format looks like shit. Trying to edit them to get them to look the way I want them to is not working out. There are too many things this style-sheet or WTF-ever seems unable to do, so I’m being forced to reformat in Word and Notepad, delete the post and re-publish it. What a pain in the ass.
Though I know I’ll be happier later on, I am not looking forward to the learning curve required to digest CSS and put it into practice. All that time…
Hold Music
…18 hours later it’s as done as it’s gonna get for now. I am going to get a book on CSS in addition to wading through all the Maddog tutorials for a second time. I only want a few changes, which seem to me simple, but it’s still going to take digesting a lot. So be it.
Once again, welcome to the new digs.
A lot of the functionality that you’re looking for is in the stylesheet. Rather than setting fonts on each post, you should set them globally on the stylesheet – that way, your content is independent from the visual style and you can make changes easily. I’m guessing that things like double-spaced paragraphs are set by your theme. Most themes seem to use block paragraphs, which I admit that I prefer for reading online. Reading on a computer screen is stressful to the eyes, and breaking up the page visually helps the reader when there is a lot of text.
When you’re migrating from an older blog where you’ve set colours, fonts, etc. on the page unfortunately you need to do some cleanup…or just live with it and know that your new posts will be clean. Sorry! I had to do it on over ten years worth of posts, and eventually I just said to hell with it – no one was going to see those old posts, anyway. 🙂
This http://codex.wordpress.org/CSS and this http://codex.wordpress.org/Finding_Your_CSS_Styles might help.
Thanks Ravven…I knew there were answers to most of my frustrations. I may need to pick our brain everyonce in a while about the finer points of CSS. I’m seriously going to check out the links. Congrats, by the way, on the book cover…killer stuff!