Identing paragraphs for dummies

  • garbunk

    (@garbunk)


    12 years, 10 months ago

    I need to indent my paragraphs. I’ve seen other questions of the same type, and the answer is inevitably “It’s easy! Just open up a command line window and frabulate your style.css, add the gifrooley, making sure to nictitate the melonium otherwise you’ll hose your whole site.” Plus the moment that a wordpress security upgrade comes out whatever file I modify by hand will be overwritten.

    All I need to do is indent every paragraph two spaces (square block spaces, it’s Chinese characters). I put ordinary spaces, didn’t work. I changed my input method to Chinese and put those kind of spaces – as soon as I click “Update” they are removed and never appear on the page.

    http://www.ledubooks.com/?page_id=18 (the text that appears when you un-collapse the headers)

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • Pioneer Web Design

    (@swansonphotos)

    12 years, 10 months ago

    http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Semantics

    Wil

    (@limecanvas)

    12 years, 10 months ago

    Hi @garbunk

    You’re asking the community for a solution which involves changing the stylesheet that controls the formatting of your page (the paragraph) so understandably the responses are going to include CSS code and an explanation of where to put the code.

    I understand that if you are not a developer/designer then the solution will probably sound like gobbledegook, however, on the flip side if you are wanting to implement the changes yourself (as opposed to paying a developer to do it for you), then you will have to read up on and understand how WordPress uses stylesheets and themes.

    A good place to start would be:
    http://codex.wordpress.org/New_To_WordPress_-_Where_to_Start

    and more specifically:
    http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Themes

    Regarding the updates getting overwritten each time you update – I assume that’s when you update your theme.

    When updating a theme, the current theme folder on the server is deleted and the new one unzipped and replaced, hence, deleting the changes you made to any of those files.

    There are two ways around this.
    1. Does your theme have any Theme Options – specifically a CSS field?
    If it does then add your CSS changes there. It will be stored as data in the database and won’t get overwritten on each theme update.

    2. Create a child theme.
    Child themes are explained here:
    http://codex.wordpress.org/Child_Themes

    Essentially they “point” to your regular theme as a “template”/parent and use all the styles and functions from it but allow you to change and override certain files.

    For example you could create a new child theme setting the theme you are using just now as its “template”/parent.

    Then you could add just one file, the style.css (this is required anyway for child themes) to the child theme and make your CSS changes there.

    Now, you can update the template/parent without deleting the updates you made to your child theme.

    I’ve tried to keep this as non-tech for you as possible.

    Hope it helps.

    Wil.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)

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